New iPhone app designed to induce dreams

Sweet dreams may no longer be wishful thinking with the iPhone app “Sigmund,” which influences users’ dreams by repeating certain words throughout the night.

Sigmund is currently the number-one paid Lifestyle App in the United States and has a four-plus rating, according to iTunes.

Daniel Nadler, the Canadian native and Harvard University graduate who developed the new app, said Harvard students who did not get much sleep inspired him.

“I would wake up to go running at six in the morning and many of them would be walking around the hallways, seemingly in a half-daze, still trying to finish papers,” Nadler said in an email interview.

From there he began do some research about sleep deprivation, where he learned from a NASA study that even a half-hour long nap can increase alertness and concentration by more than a third, while brief naps can improve concentration on memory for longer periods, he said.

From that information, Nadler said he wanted to assimilate all of these studies and put them in one place, so he applied to the Harvard’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative for funding to create a research-directed reading group.

As he was conducting research, Nadler noticed there was significant evidence of information processing in the sleeping brain, which includes assimilation of external sensory information such as scents and hearing during sleep.

“We all know this anecdotally – hearing a nearby conversation while we are dozing off, for example on a train, and having some of the subjects in the conversation enter our dreams,” Nadler said.

Nadler said he also came across a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry, in which researchers played recorded, spoken personal names to the sleeping subject during the rapid eye movement stage of their sleep cycle.

The study suggested the spoken names presented during REM sleep entered the dream sequences because subjects correctly matched names with the correct dreams upon awakening.

Nadler said he noticed the study was hard to recreate outside of a lab because people generally did not have the time to record all the words they wanted to hear, space them apart correctly and start the recording while the person was asleep.

That is how he came up with the idea for the iPhone app, he said.

Nadler said he was introduced to Doug Feigelson, a computer science and engineering major from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who recently won Facebook’s Brown-Harvard-MIT intercollegiate hackathon, to help him create the app.

“I asked all my friends in computer science about doing this on a smartphone and they said it was extremely technically difficult,” Nadler said. “They said that to reproduce these kinds of sleep and dream studies on a smartphone, you would have to work with a library of thousands of distinct recorded words and allow users to select from very precise combinations of words.“

Nadler said Feigelson spent more than one year building the app, which allows users to choose from more than a thousand prerecorded words, such as “beach,” “tropical” and “tiger,” which the app softly plays during REM sleep.

“You can imagine the technical sophistication that goes into this – it was not like loading a few abstract ocean or bird sounds onto an iPhone,” Nadler said.

Despite Sigmund’s high ratings on iTunes, Boston University students said the idea of having an app program dreams is odd.

“[The app] really freaks me out,” said College of Communication sophomore Christina Gratton. “I don’t like that idea because I think that dreams are uncontrollable.”

College of Arts and Sciences junior Jayme Mask said she would not use it even if she did have an iPhone.

“The coolest thing about dreams is that you wake up and think ‘is that real?’” Mask said. “I want them to be a part of my imagination – not a part of my real life.”