Sculpting Dreams

Researchers are investigating how playing sounds to a sleeping person can affect their dreams.

Courtesy of Luke Jerram Sound asleep? Researchers are looking at how sounds from the external environment can affect dreams.

When we sleep, our eyes are closed, but our ears still seem to be open. Sounds in our environment can incorporate themselves into our dreams and psychologists at the University of the West of England in Bristol, U.K. are studying how this can affect sleep. Collaborating with them is an artist, Luke Jerram, who has recently created the Sky Orchestra. Composed of seven hot air balloons each playing a different part of a musical score, he is releasing the balloons at dawn over different cities to see if they influence the sleep of local residents.

The early morning is prime time for affecting people's dreams. Throughout the night, sleep cycles through five stages: four non-REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stages and one REM stage. Most dreams occur during REM sleep when activity in the brain's neurons is heightened and similar to being awake. Since periods of REM sleep get longer throughout the night - typically lasting about ten minutes early on and increasing to about one hour - people tend to have more dreams before they wake up.

But the problem for dream researchers is that people don't always remember their dreams. As beautiful and inspiring as the Sky Orchestra is, it is hard to tell what its results are. Although people who have experienced it can fill in a questionnaire explaining how their dreams were affected, the researchers often find that most people remember being woken up and rushing to the window to see what was happening!

Courtesy of Luke Jerram The Sky Orchestra: Artist Luke Jerram has been releasing hot air ballons that play music at dawn to see how it affects the sleepers below.

So Jerram is finding another way of informing his Sky Orchestra work. The team is working on the Dream Director, a device that monitors the heart rate of a sleeper and then plays music embedded with specific sounds - for example the sound of a cash register - when it detects REM sleep. People are asked to report their dreams so that the researchers can investigate whether or not the sounds have had an effect.