It Uses A.I. It Goes on Your Head. Can It Induce Lucid Dreams?

 

 Eric Wollberg’s interest in facilitating lucid dreams emerged while living in Jerusalem, reading lots of theology. “Abraham, Muhammad, Buddha, all those prophets received their prophetic wisdom in their dreams,” the startup and tech investment alum told me recently. During some periods of his life, Wollberg too regularly experienced the sorts of dreams where he knew he was awake. He wondered whether there was a way to use emerging technology to have them on demand.

 

Last February a hint came from, of all people, Grimes. The electronic pop artist retweeted a software engineer named Wesley Berry III, who was playing around with turning brain waves into art and running his computer with his thoughts. Soon Wollberg was at Berry’s house in San Francisco, pitching him on applying one of these electrode-filled brain activity–monitoring headsets to lucid dreams.

 

Within just four months, Wollberg and Berry’s new company, Prophetic, raised more than $1 million in funding for a consumer device—the “Halo”—from venture capital heavy hitters and acquired advisers who’d worked in neurotech at Apple. They also promptly forged a research collaboration with a widely respected neuroscience institute and a company that built hardware for Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, a detail that has been featured in articles about this new “A.I. startup.” Already they’ve invited customers to pay to reserve one of the first devices, which they intend to start shipping in 2025. At an event in New York City on Friday, potential investors will see a “prototype” of the Halo and learn about the company’s plan to use generative A.I., similar to the tech behind ChatGPT, on brain data to induce and stabilize lucidity in the dreamer.

 

Read More Here:  Slate