MIT’s Dormio Is Designed to Expand Your Creative Thinking By Balancing You on the Cusp of…

Hypnagogia is something just about everyone has experienced at one time or another. It’s a semi-lucid sleep state that you enter just as you’re starting to fall asleep, but before you’re actually fully unconscious. Many people, like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and Salvador Dalí, believed that hypnagogia could be a useful tool for creative thinking, and intentionally extended the experience. They did that by holding a steel ball that would make a loud noise when they reached unconsciousness and dropped, the goal being to partially wake back up and remain in hypnagogia.

Now, researchers from MIT’s Media Lab have come up with a device called Dormio that reproduces that effect using modern technology. Dormio is a glove-like apparatus that contains sensors for monitoring your muscle tension, heart rate, and skin-conductivity. It has the ability to determine your sleep state based on the readings from those sensors, and so it knows when you’re in hypnagogia and when you become completely unconscious.

When Dormio has detected that you’ve crossed from hypnagogia into unconsciousness, it gently wakes you back up by playing a sound through an app or an accompanying robot assistant. The idea is that you’ll be nudged back into hypnagogia — but not actual wakefulness — so that you can let your mind remain engaged in creative thinking. Hypnagogia isn’t quite what most people refer to as lucid dreaming, but may have potential for exploring unusual thinking that you’d normally only experience for a short time.

If you want to try Dormio for yourself, the team from MIT has released the design files under an open source license. It’s not available for purchase as a turnkey device yet, but you could certainly build your own if you’ve got some skill with electronics.