In case you’re lucky enough to have missed it, ‘dream hacking’ is the latest nightmare of modern life that could have been ripped right out of a Black Mirror episode. Dream hacking is, essentially, the concept of influencing a person’s dreams in order to advertise stuff, and it’s closer to becoming a reality than you might expect.
Back in 2020, researchers at MIT invented Dormio, an “app in conjunction with a wearable sleep-tracking sensor device” that, in simple terms, could influence the dreams of test subjects by playing certain sounds as the entered a specific stage of sleep known as the ‘transitional state’ (that stage where you’re not quite asleep but not really fully awake). An audio cue would prompt test subjects to think of a word, for example ‘tree’. And according to later reports, 70% of subjects did indeed have dreams featuring trees — proving that our dreams can be directly influenced by outside stimuli.
For marketers, this looks like a golden opportunity, and according to a recent survey of over 400 marketing professionals conducted by the The American Marketing Association of New York, more than three-quarters already plan to use dream hacking technology as early as 2025. Even more scarily, messing with people’s dreams for advertising isn’t completely unprecedented. Over a decade ago, ad agency BBDO Germany trialled a system for playing messages through train windows that would only be audible when a person rested their head against the glass. In 2018, Burger King released a ‘Nightmare King’ as a Halloween marketing stunt — claiming the burger was “clinically proven” to induce nightmares. However, these two stunts are vitally different from the ‘dream hacking’ that marketers are hoping to capitalise on following Dormio.
Just like when we fall asleep watching TV, listening to an ad while unconscious won’t necessarily disrupt the way our brains naturally create dreams. And consensually eating a burger in the hope you’ll have a fun nightmare isn’t all that different to buying a movie ticket to a horror film. In 2021, Coors beer took things a step further, offering people a discounted crate of beer if they took part in their experiment into what Marcelo Pascoa, Vice President of Marketing at Molson Coors called “Targeted Dream Incubation […] a never-before-seen form of advertising.” An eight-hour soundscape that was available online would supposedly influence listeners to dream about Coors and associated positive imagery (fresh snowy mountainsides, clear alpine rivers, etc.) the night before the Super Bowl. Critics raised concerns over the ethics of this, particularly questioning the harm this could have on someone with alcohol dependency issues. Vitally though, this campaign was an ‘opt-in’ situation.
What has dream researchers worried now are the ethical implications of dream hacking when it happens non-consensually. What happens if airlines start playing ‘dream hacking’ advertisements, for example? Or if they make their way into the soundtracks of films and TV shows, like product placement on a whole other level. A PHD student at MIT, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a sleep and dream researcher at at the Université de Montréal co-authored an essay outlining their stance on the use of their technology for marketing purposes, specifically pointing to the Coors campaign as an example of problematic ‘manipulation’ and that Zayn Malik, who agreed to sleep on Instagram Live whilst having an incubated Coors dream, later described it as “kinda messed up”.
They also revealed that key members of the research team behind Dormio have already been approached by advertising agencies and tech companies keen to take advantage of this technology. “We are also baffled by the lack of public outcry over the mere idea of having our nightly dreams infiltrated, at grand scale, by corporate advertisers,” they write. “What have we lost when we become so collectively inured to invasions of our privacy and to exploitative economic practice that we would happily accept a 12-pack for the placement of beer advertising into our dreams?”
Matthew Bowes is a psychotherapist and dream researcher. Speaking from his home in Brighton, he explains how important dreams are to our wellbeing. “Through our dreams we process our emotions and integrate our experiences. Many dream researchers liken dreams to an internal therapist and I think that’s a helpful analogy. Dreams are fundamental to the way we build our sense of self… to intrude upon this by inserting messages with the intention of making us buy products, to manipulate our choices when our defences are down so to speak — is nothing short of abusive.”
However, the genuine efficacy of ‘dream hacking’ for marketing is still (for the time being) somewhat unknown. In MIT’s own research, although a large portion of subjects dreamt of trees, the way they dreamt of trees was wildly different and individual. Some dreamed they had become a tree, others dreamed of “eating trees like finger food”. This could be explained by the way our brains work when we’re in certain sleep stages, when our limbic system — the part of the brain that regulates memory and has to do with emotion and learning — is more active. “In this state, our associative field is opened up,” Matthew says. “So the way we process certain stimuli will be highly individual and will come from our own personal associations. We might take it somewhere else entirely, somewhere completely unexpected.”
Dream research is itself ever evolving and has seen some drastic changes in direction in just the past couple of decades. Lucid dreaming, for example, has recently become a more serious area of study and has seen positive results in treating PTSD. This represents a big shift when you consider it wasn’t until very recently that psychologists collectively agreed that lucid dreams actually exist. When it comes to dream hacking, legal experts are only just starting to talk about “The Nightmare of Dream Advertising” and even MIT openly admit that they are on the peripheries of their own understanding on the topic, concluding their official statement on the ethics of dream hacking by saying: “Please get in touch if you think we’re missing anything.”
“There are so many unknowns here,” Matthew says. “I’d say that’s exactly why we shouldn’t be fucking with this.”