A Yahoo! Tech news report takes a look at SleepPhones, new headphones designed to improve the quality of sleep with the ability to induce lucid dreams.
AcousticSheep, the company behind SleepPhones, touts the product as a solution to bad sleep, and suggests that it can improve the quality of your rest each night with music — which may very well be true — but hidden inside the app is a truly unique function: the ability to induce lucid dreams.
Strangely, this isn’t something that the AcousticSheep advertises. The brains of the operation, Dr. Wei-Shin Lai, didn’t even mention it to us until we asked about it — but the functionality is totally there.
Here’s how it works. Once you’ve strapped them on your head and conked out, SleepPhones use a set of accelerometers to track your movement while you sleep. Generally speaking, when you’re in REM sleep, you don’t move around at all. So after it learns your sleep patterns, the headband can make an educated guess on when you’re in a deep, dream-filled sleep state, and then switch on some music. The idea is that you’ll be able to hear this music in your dream, realize you’re dreaming, and go lucid — just like Inception.
