Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Dream machine

“The general concept is you’d sit down with it for a few minutes before you go to bed,” said Peter Harwood, senior marketing manager with Takara USA. Once this is done, he added, you are ready to visit Venice in your dreams.

A new dimension

Once photographed and enrolled in the database, a person approaching a camera or a security checkpoint apparently can be identified accurately in less than five seconds within a 6.5-foot range.


5 comments

  1. “The general concept is you’d sit down with it for a few minutes before you go to bed,”

    This sounds very 1984/Brave New World. This fact concerns me greatly.

    • “As I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep,
      and if I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take”

      Nothing changes, they’re just different gods.

      • That’s creepy.

        It reminds me of the episode of Futurama where Bender meets God. He’s half-computer, so he speaks in binary – probably the best representation of a deity I’ve seen.

  2. The thing with that dream machine, is that part of what’s so cool about my dreams is that I couldn’t possibly think them up while in a waking frame of mind. They are surreal, idiosyncratic and full of paradoxes and non sequiturs. That’s what I like about them. Anything I tried to ‘program’ into myself before I went to sleep would consist too much of elements which logically went together. To take the example of Venice, I might start programming in Italian music, the scents of ice-cream and pizza, etc. Whereas if I actually dreamt about Venice, I could encounter anything at all there. And if I just programmed in random stuff to try to create something more like my actual dreams, then I might as well just not program anything at all, and let me brain get on with the dreaming it generally does so well!

    Nice idea, but I won’t be buying… Not until they invent a machine which records the dreams I actually do have for playback whenever I want!

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