Spudart shared an interesting idea in his post "Send me a dream through instant messenger" – what if you could influence someone's dreams through an instant message?

Since there's currently no (known) IM to brain link available, and because the idea intrigues me, I started trying to come up with a way to make it possible. It's not as elegant and simple as instant-message-to-brain technology, but my solution would come as close as our current technology allows.

The Setup

A new IM or Twitter account set up specifically for receiving dream suggestions.

A program that watches for or checks for new messages. Twitter would be easiest as I could easily make a program that watches for new tweets and downloads them.

A function in the program that outputs (using text to speech) dream IMs or tweets that have been received.

The Function

Before going to sleep, the dreamer would notify the program that it should start looking for submitted dreams. The program would then update the dreamers status on various sites (Facebook, AIM, Twitter, etc) asking people to send dreams. The program would then check for new submissions and wait a set time (maybe 30 minutes) to allow the dreamer time to fall asleep before reading out suggestions using the least harsh sounding text-to-speech engine I could find.

It could be set up to either repeat each dream suggestion at set intervals for a certain amount of time before moving on to the next (to give the suggestion more time to sink into the dreamer's subconscious), or repeat available suggestions randomly (to cram a bunch of suggestions in with each other.)

The dreamer could set up a blacklist of words to block from being allowed into their dreams, and could use a function like PHP's "soundex()" to filter out dream spammer's attempts to bypass that filter.

Am I really worried about dream spammers? Eeesh.

The Test

Now, I'm not brave enough to undertake a project like this – my dreams are crazy enough as it is. But I'm sure someone out there is both interested and feels like guinea-pigging themselves. If you're such a person, I'd be more than willing to help you set this up. 🙂

Actually, giving this a second thought before I schedule this to be published, maybe I would be interested in experimenting on myself. I'll have to think about it.