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It usually begins with too many rich calories before bedtime. Then a highly active day keeps the mind unruly as it enters into sleep. Now you’ve set the stage for the unconscious imagination to put on a spectacular show – the kind you only get to enjoy during your visit to dreamland. If you’re lucky you wake the next morning knowing that you experienced something wonderful – even if it was a nightmare – but can only remember bits and pieces. You may try and relate it to your friends, but it’s like showing them sections of a broken jigsaw puzzle, and you know their excitement is really just politeness. Well, necessity is the mother of invention, and you turn to your workbench, determined to not let this happen again. You’re going to build a dream recorder!

You’ve got a lot of work to do. Current brain scan and EEG equipment only shows colored regions of activity or squiggly lines on a graph paper – you want something that will play well on a wide, high-def screen. So how do you obtain, record, translate, process, and display your nocturnal experience so that it's worthy of being the main event of an evening get-together with friends?

Step 1: data collection. This is the most critical to fidelity, but unfortunately, where the most compromises need to be made as well. Since this is primarily for entertainment, penetrating the scalp isn't a consideration. Some sort of sensory "hat" needs to be designed that's both non-invasive and comfortable enough to wear for a good night's sleep. It also has to have enough resolution and sensitivity to your mind's brain waves that a fairly accurate and detailed media experience can be derived from the collected data. There's also the reality that brain waves emitted from our head are only a very small indication of what's going on inside. In addition to electrical activity, much of the brain's function is chemical - neurotransmitter molecules passing between the nerve cells. You can construct your sensory hat with extremely responsive electrodes, and use a system of triangulation to pinpoint the origin of each emission, but the chemical part you'll just have to guess at. This will be like trying to picture what's going on at a party in the next room by pressing your ear against the wall. It's not an ideal system, but it's realistically all you have to work with - so step 2 becomes essential.

Step 2: interpretation. This is where computing power tries to make sense of massive amounts of raw data. Once you've made your sensory unit and fit it on your head so it won't slide around, you have to teach the system to interpret what the high-speed and complex electrical patterns that it detects may represent. The best way you can think of is to "insert" pre-determined images and experiences into your consciousness by presenting them on some sort of virtual-reality media player. You first try to clear your mind of all other thoughts to minimize mental artifacts, then focus just on what your device presents to you. By repeating this process with a wide variety of these experiences and images, and reading the resulting brain-wave patterns each time, you hope your system is starting to "learn" on at least a crude level what the patterns represent. Because dreams are ultimately boundless and unpredictable you know it's impossible to cover the full spectrum of what your subconscious might create, but a large enough sample might be enough to make the interpretation process work. Now you store the correlated data in your machine's massive database and hope it's ready for the first trial run.

Here comes the part that most inventors both anticipate and fear. Will it work? There's only one way to find out... You go to the fridge, take out a pint of double-chocolate fudge, and slowly enjoy it as you contemplate the hard work of your invention. Afterward, as you lay down and prepare for sleep, you cross your fingers and hope that tomorrow you'll get to actually watch what it was like trying to run from that monster that was chasing you!  :-)
 

P.H.