By Matthew Burgos

HOW SLEEP STATE NURTURES HUMAN DESIGN AND CREATIVITY

While most technology is built for waking life – meaning the hours we are alert and awake – a third of our lives happens in darkness, in a sleep state we are barely conscious of. Adam Haar Horowitz, a cognitive scientist and CEO of DUST, treats those hours not as downtime, but as a space to design and influence thought, as his work focuses on the hypnagogic state – or the threshold between wakefulness and sleep – where the brain produces ideas that are associative, fluid, and untethered from logic. He and his team at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Lab have developed tools to detect that state and guide it, transforming sleep into a medium for creativity, research, and artistic exploration. The starting point is Dormio, the device Adam Haar Horowitz led the creation of at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Lab with a team of neuroscientists, engineers, and designers. 

It’s basically a glove fitted with biosensors – a flex sensor in the fingers and a pulse oximeter for a full description – that monitors the body’s transition from waking into sleep. It targets hypnagogia, the state between waking and sleep, sometimes called sleep onset, where the brain produces a quality of thought that is associative and loosely connected, and ‘not constrained by the logic structures of full wakefulness.’ In the past, Salvador Dalí used to hold a key over a metal plate as he dozed, so that when he fell asleep and his hand relaxed, the key would drop and the sound would wake him, while Thomas Edison did something similar with steel balls. They were both trying to catch the hypnagogic state, but Dormio reaches for it with biosensors instead of keys and metal objects.

ADAM HAAR HOROWITZ’S DEVICES CAN STEER OUR ‘DREAMS’

When Dormio detects that the person wearing it is entering sleep onset, a connected app plays a pre-recorded audio cue, a word or phrase related to a chosen subject, delivered into the room through a speaker. The person, still in hypnagogia, incorporates the cue into their thoughts and reports their experience aloud when the app prompts them to wake. This process, which the scientist and his collaborators call Targeted Dream Incubation, found that post-sleep creative performance increases after targeted dream incubation, meaning users became more ‘creative’ in their thinking. Through the glove, they were able to steer the content of what their sleeping brain generates.

Another project where Adam Haar Horowitz tests dreams is The Dream Hotel. Working with artist Carsten Höller, he designed a series of museum installations, each one a room in which a person goes to sleep under conditions engineered to produce a specific kind of dream. Dream Hotel Room #1, shown at Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, and LUMA Arles in 2024, uses a bed that rocks participants to sleep on a motorized platform, a rotating replica of the Amanita muscaria mushroom spinning overhead, and audio stimuli chosen for their association with flight. In the study and data collected after, the report says that 67 percent of participants reported dreams involving flying.