Lucid Dream Startup Says Engineers Can Write Code In Their Sleep (fortune.com) 141
An anonymous reader writes: People spend one-third of their lives asleep. What if employees could work during that time ... in their dreams? Prophetic, a venture-backed startup founded earlier this year, wants to help workers do just that. Using a headpiece the company calls the "Halo," Prophetic says consumers can induce a lucid dream state, which occurs when the person having a dream is aware they are sleeping. The goal is to give people control over their dreams, so they can use that time productively. A CEO could practice for an upcoming board meeting, an athlete could run through plays, a web designer could create new templates -- "the limiting factor is your imagination," founder and CEO Eric Wollberg told Fortune.
Consumer devices claiming to induce lucid dream states aren't new. Headbands, eye masks, and boxes with electrodes that stick to the forehead all populate the market. Even some supplements claim to do the trick. But there's still an appetite for new technologies, since the potential for creativity and problem-solving is so great and since many on the market don't work to the extent they promise, a dreaming expert told Fortune. The potential of lucid dreaming is less about conquering specific problems and more about finding new, creative ways to approach topics that a sleeper couldn't previously fathom. For example, a mathematician might not reach a specific, numerical answer to a math problem while asleep, but the lucid dream allows them to explore new strategies to tackle the equation while awake. Halos will cost around $1,500 to $2,000 each.
Consumer devices claiming to induce lucid dream states aren't new. Headbands, eye masks, and boxes with electrodes that stick to the forehead all populate the market. Even some supplements claim to do the trick. But there's still an appetite for new technologies, since the potential for creativity and problem-solving is so great and since many on the market don't work to the extent they promise, a dreaming expert told Fortune. The potential of lucid dreaming is less about conquering specific problems and more about finding new, creative ways to approach topics that a sleeper couldn't previously fathom. For example, a mathematician might not reach a specific, numerical answer to a math problem while asleep, but the lucid dream allows them to explore new strategies to tackle the equation while awake. Halos will cost around $1,500 to $2,000 each.
That's nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't even escape your job in your sleep.
How dystopian of them.
Re:That's nice (Score:5, Funny)
Can't even escape your job in your sleep.
How dystopian of them.
That’s ok, it only compiles and runs in their dreams.
Coppertop and leisure suit larry (Score:3)
Where's your loyalty the company? You weren't using that part of your brain anyhow.
But if they paid you for it. Well that would be like gig work . Rent a brain. A mesh network of elastic brain servers.
Of course all the code they'd write would strangely resemble liesure suit Larry
Re: (Score:2)
Where's your loyalty the company? You weren't using that part of your brain anyhow.
But if they paid you for it. Well that would be like gig work . Rent a brain. A mesh network of elastic brain servers.
Maybe we could extend the sleep cycle to last all the time since it’s so productive, you could even be provided a nice pod to rest in. I even hear that arrangement could produce lots of power.. ..
Re: (Score:2)
Was thinking in a similar direction. Or rather the Matrix should have used our brains for computational power as a plot device rather than energy production.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Fuck that noise.
also :
Leela: Didn't you have ad's in the 20th century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!
Re:That's nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Futurama:
Didn't you have ads in your century?
Well sure, but not in our dreams! Only on TV & radio, and in magazines, in movies at ballgames on buses, milk cartons and t-shirts and bananas, and written on the sky. But never in our dreams!
Re: (Score:2)
isn't that the plot of the Matrix?
Anderson was a gifted coder who had trouble sleeping. He knew a guy offered him meds to help with his insomnia but was pushing something stronger with some nasty side effects such as hallucinating that you were living in a video game with a fetish for black leather.
Re:That's nice (Score:5, Funny)
No this is great, I can sleep through work!
Re: (Score:3)
You couldn't before?
Amateur.
Re: (Score:3)
On the other hand I would love to get my 8 hour work day done while asleep.
Re:That's nice (Score:4, Insightful)
If I'm working in my sleep, then I'm getting paid for that time. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (And make no mistake, California will interpret it that way, and enforce it. After the first week, it's automatically 100% double time roughly eight times the pay for a 40 hour week, until there's a proper break.)
Most people will be able to retire by 30.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The whole idea is bullshit to begin with, but if you accept that as plausible, the rest logically follows. California doesn't give any more of a damn about workers than any other state, but they love screwing over companies. Wages can't drop below minimum wage, and eight times that, in a few more years, will be is over a quarter million bucks a year.
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
A slaveholder's dream (Score:3)
Especially management of the "slaveholder" type will be thrilled by this. Obviously, no useful code will ever come out, but being able to control your slaves while they sleep? Priceless!
Management isn't the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Or Nightmares (Score:2)
I once was on a tough programming problem that vexed me most of the day and at night I had a dream/nightmare where I was trying to solve it only to come up with the same lame solution over and over and over again. Have you ever dreamnt of some awesome song song never heard before and were able to remember the lyrics and realize once awake it was not really that good? (actually pretty bad)
Dreaming is the generative AI of the brain.
Re: (Score:2)
I once was on a tough programming problem that vexed me most of the day and at night I had a dream/nightmare where I was trying to solve it only to come up with the same lame solution over and over and over again. Have you ever dreamnt of some awesome song song never heard before and were able to remember the lyrics and realize once awake it was not really that good? (actually pretty bad)
Dreaming is the generative AI of the brain.
I've written a ton of songs while dreaming. About 25% are worth keeping once I actually get them recorded. But I could totally see a management type thinking 25% return on on employees sleep time being worth it if it prevented them from having a moment's peace from the nightmare of creating profit for someone else. God damn, this is a truly frightening prospect.
Fusion (Score:3)
Great...we can work 24-7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Work when you're awake. Work when you're asleep. Work when you're having sex. Work instead of being a parent to your kids. The dystopian nightmare that is our future lurches closer and closer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are correct, Sir. How churlish of me!
My God, are there no limits to the greed? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that workers need to sleep drives the owner class absolutely insane. They've been fighting it since the concept of the 8 hour work day came along. If they can make it work, and work well enough to justify foisting it out into the world, I can see the corporate fat-cats lobbying to make it a legally viable option to force programmers to run this shit during every sleep cycle. And most likely, somewhere down the line, lobbying to make it legal to induce perma-sleep states for the best programmers in sleep-state so that they never have to lose critical momentum.
If this actually flies, at all, it'll be a race to see if we can get AI up to speed enough we no longer need human programmers, and warehouses filled with sleeping bodies programming 24/7 in dream-state, never actually living. Jesus wept. We are truly headed towards a nightmarish dystopia of hell.
but look at the upside you can sleep and do drugs (Score:2)
but look at the upside you can sleep and do drugs on the clock.
Not just greed (Score:2, Insightful)
Puritanicalism is the greatest blight on our species in history. Folks focus on the obsession with work but miss that second fundamental. That if you get something good you must be punished for it. Always. It's an entire philosophy that believes nothing can ever get better in the slightest because we're supposed to be in a constant state of misery where pleasure and happiness on
Re: (Score:2)
"Folks focus on the obsession with work but miss that second fundamental. That if you get something good you must be punished for it."
This isn't just some American obsession but rather human nature. Without being discontent and unhappy we'd all just lay in bed and starve to death. Want to not starve? Someone has to do the work of hunting/raising the food, preparing the food, cleaning up the meal prep, cleaning up the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms after the waste comes out, drilling and plumbing for the nat
I disagree (Score:2)
Productivity is bad when machines are doing all the work and 1% get all the profit. It starts to grind our entire civilization to a halt. Capitalism works when large swaths of labor are extremely valuable. Basically Post WWII after we killed off a huge %age of the population and blew everything up so it had to
People taken as a whole have limits (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
the sky is falling, we will be forced to do things
But we know it was us who scorched the sky.
Re: (Score:2)
"Nobody can force you to work in your sleep. Nobody can force you to work except a government actually, a company cannot."
Bullshit. If that were true there would be no employment credit or drug screening. Nobody is legitimately willing to be subjected to those things and they are none of an employer's business. There is no REASONABLE alternative but to agree to these things because all the alternatives either also require them or are extreme outliers and it is fair to call it 'forced.' Similarly, this was t
Re: (Score:2)
"NO. If you had the misfortune to have been born in North Korea, Cuba, Palestine, the former USSR, you could then argue about being forced, that would be a legitimate claim, the government forcing you."
Yes, that is also forced but when you have no REASONABLE alternatives that is 'forced' enough to be unacceptable in a modern society. We should be stopping duress a threshold far FAR less than gun to your head or literal torture. Failure to do so falls far short of the fundamental right to pursue happiness. T
Re: (Score:2)
Non paywalled (Score:5, Informative)
Non paywalled link to the article. [yahoo.com]
So many problems... (Score:3)
Well, obviously, it's horse shit. Inducing Lucid dreaming is on shaky enough ground, getting structured productive data from an unconscious brain is just ridiculous (which is the only way the "web designer" example could make sense).
But even imagining that they could work, even a lucid dreamer is like a really stoned person. They may *think* they are having amazing ideas at the time and are very smart, but upon sober review it's utterly garbage (with a slight chance that maybe a fictional story might have something in it, but even then it's usually crappy).
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know about "inducing lucid dreaming", but I do know that the code I've designed while I was asleep has had glaring places where I just dropped context for several crucial things. That's just the stuff I remember while awakening, of course. The rest I didn't even remember long enough to evaluate. (I don't think this qualifies as "lucid dreaming", as it was the stuff I was dreaming just as I awoke. But it's probably a fair guide to the quality.)
Re: (Score:2)
If you are already dreaming about coding you desperately need to escape.
Re: (Score:2)
You might. I happen to enjoy it. But I still wonder what it means. Dreams usually aren't about what they appear to be about.
Re: (Score:2)
"Inducing Lucid dreaming is on shaky enough ground"
Do you mean a device which can do so or inducing lucid dreaming at all? I've never had a device induce lucid dreams. Those things are normally several hundred dollars or more which I'd happily pay for a surefire and working product but would never pay just to find out. Further they are usually composed of electronics that for any other purpose would be under $50 or in the case of the masks they sell less than $15.
That said I know inducing lucid dreams is po
Re: (Score:2)
I meant devices. Not sure there's data showing that any of them are any more successful than placebo.
Yes, people can induce lucid dream (or did you have a lucid dream, or merely dreamt that you had a lucid dream?). However I'll say that even when you *think* it's perfectly stable and productive, it's almost certain that if you could view it more objectively, your lucid dream is not all *that* grounded in actual reality.
I'll admit to not having a lot of scientific work to reference, but everyone I have eve
Re: (Score:2)
"Yes, people can induce lucid dream (or did you have a lucid dream, or merely dreamt that you had a lucid dream?)."
Way to inception it up. But no, if you are aware you are dreaming within a dream and don't immediately wake upon realizing it, then it is a lucid dream so if at the end of the chain of within's it's you, actually dreaming and being aware of it then it is a lucid dream.
"However I'll say that even when you *think* it's perfectly stable and productive, it's almost certain that if you could view it
will they tell you how to beat the drug test? (Score:2)
will they tell you how to beat the drug test?
Re: (Score:2)
Don't use drugs. I know what you're thinking, it's such a simple process it can't be done.
Shut up and take my money! (Score:2)
Only $2K to offer up the last 6 hours of my day to our corporate overlords?
Where do I sign?
Napping at work (Score:2)
If the company gets me this I could sleep at work and justify it.
Sure (Score:3)
Oh I'm sure this will take off and in no time everyone will be "coding in their sleep". Sure it will.
FFS, it's hard enough to code competently when you're awake, I don't think coding in a dream state will be any better.
Please stop with these bullshit ad-hype stories.
Depressingly mundane? (Score:2)
"Engineers Can Write Code In Their Sleep" (Score:5, Insightful)
And judging by some of the code I've seen, many of them *do*.
Elon will love it... (Score:2)
It might be part of the job at Tesla or X
Re: (Score:2)
ummm (Score:2)
yeah, right.
Dear "Return to the Office" managers... (Score:2)
No, I'm not napping at my desk. I'm coding.
Sure and with a small investment (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, let me use that copious spare time between midnight and 6 am to do more work. Hell, you can even shove a broom up my ass and I'll sweep the floor at the same time.
Re: (Score:2)
it works (Score:2)
Asking for a friend... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wasting a good lucid dream (Score:2)
As a person who has experienced several very fun lucid dreams, I can't imagine wasting them doing code.
Some of the programs we rely on... (Score:2)
act as if the developer wrote it in their sleep.
Lucid Dreams = Waking Zombie? (Score:2)
Perhaps people are different. Every time I tried to think about much of anything while I was aware of being inside a dream it was always an exercise in futility having tasks I knew were frustratingly simple escape me.
I suspect if people could be "all there" while sleeping it probably would obviate much of the point of sleep in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
One of the tests you do when you are dreaming, to determine that you are dreaming, is to try to read something twice. Supposedly you can't read in a dream or the text will change. That would make coding fun.
Let's go back to Feynman's memoir (Score:4, Informative)
And his experiments with weed and sensory deprivation tanks in 1970s California.
He wrote that at first he thought he really was reaching higher states of consciousness, really on the cusp of opening his mind to the universe and just just on the edge of transcending into greater understanding. Tantalizing stuff for a physicist of his caliber, or anyone who cogitates while sitting on their ass for a living.
And then, when fully awake and not high he had an even more profound revelation: he was daydreaming and consulting his own imagination, and for no good reason was believing his own imagination about having achieved a higher understanding rather than consulting experimental data to verify that that understanding was accurate. Very much the opposite of what science is. And he stopped playing with this stuff and went back to doing science the old fashioned way: awake and lucid rather than blitzed out of his mind and delusional.
I myself have had plenty of "lucid" dreams. About the only lucid thing about it was a vague sense that this isn't real. No deep insights into my personal life or my work or anything. Plenty of crazy shit that wouldn't really work IRL. Just immersive delusions.
And quite honestly, any "code" written while dreaming would just as likely be predicated on 2 plus 2 equaling 42 to work as anything else. Not really a recipe for any kind of success.
So where are we? Someone pitching pleasant-sounding snakeoil predicated on delusions being real.
Too Bad (Score:2)
Sounds interesting (Score:2)
I am ok with it, as long as managers conduct meetings and shareholders enjoy their profits the same way.
The Future? (Score:2)
Re: The Future? (Score:2)
Would we get paid for that time? (Score:2)
Or is it that employers want to go back to the "good old days", where people's *normal" working day was 16 hours, six days a week?
Talk about a horrible salesman... (Score:2)
Have a completely lucid and aware dreamscape at your disposal that you can bend and manipulate to your whim! Just think of all the additional labor we could squeeze out of you!
I've had lucid dreams and neither the lucidity nor the dreamscape was stable enough to do anything productive, perhaps the way the Halo induces this state would trigger the ideal parts of the brain and fix that but you can be damn sure if start working on anything in my dreams it will be work FOR ME not my employer.
What's the news? (Score:2)
A lot of code I reviewed lately sure looked like whoever wrote it was asleep at the keyboard.
Um. (Score:2)
My Greatest Breakthroughs (Score:2)
My greatest breakthroughs in the last 40 years came while:
- Sleeping: once
- Peeling carrots: once
- On a smoke break: lots of times, but the cigarettes weren't really the necessary part
- In the shower: lots of times
And for the record, the cigarettes cost more than $2000 in total, but the carrots were cheap and the showers were necessary anyway.
If it worked (Score:2)
You would sell this device for recreational use, not work. If it was reliable enough.
Yet more ways to exploit workers? (Score:2)
Fun experiment (Score:2)
I lucid dream often and enjoy it immensely. In my dreams the #1 fastest way to punch out is to read something. Look around, find some text on anything, a page, a book binding an advertisement, and /read/ the text, focusing on the shapes of the letters as the assemble into words*. Whatever portion of my brain handles OCR is normally off during sleep and clicking it on wakes me up instantly.
* The distinction I'm trying to make here is between reading and choosing to know what something says. It took me age
Can? When don't I? (Score:2)
I do not spend a third of my life asleep (Score:2)
I do not spend a third of my life asleep. It's more like two thirds. My whole life has been a preparation for the time when I can earn money while snoring and farting. I am the modern Stakhanov.
15 Minutes a night (Score:2)
If I'm working, I'm getting paid by the hour. The problem is, we only dream about 15 minutes a night. The rest of the night, the brain is in cleaning or stand-by mode.
I already do this (Score:3)
While I would love to experience their augmented capability, I already do this.
When I start work with a new org, the way I know I have settled in is when I wake up with a solution to a problem I went to sleep with the night before.
I've been in tech since the 1980's, and it did take me a couple of decades to see this, but I now sleep with a notepad and pen next to me in bed.
"People spend one third of their life asleep"... (Score:3)
...but only about 20-25% of it is spent in REM sleep. So, right off the bat, there is a major misconception in the summary: something which is obvious to anyone with even a passing interest in sleep physiology, or anyone who is willing to spend 10 seconds googling.
As far as I know, there is *no* device you can wear on your head which induces or prolongs a specific sleep stage. Yes, I'm aware that you can buy all sorts of devices which claim to do so. If you can point me to a peer-reviewed study that supports those claims, I'll be very interested in reading it. (There are a few medications which can influence sleep stages-- e.g., there are medications which *shorten* time spent in REM. I don't know if there are any which have been shown to prolong REM time).
Sounds like hell to me (Score:2)
Anyone who wants to live a healthy life, has to get *away* from work, get actual rest. This is not that.
Asperger's (Score:2)
Asperger's,
it just comes naturally.
That is the way of the future.
Works on my machine... (Score:3)
It compiled just fine when I dreamt it last night.
Re:What nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
While you may or may not be joking, I know I've actually had it happen before where I've spent a week or more on a problem at work and eventually had a dream about coding the solution. After typing it up the next day, it worked. I'd be surprised if that didn't happen to other people.
Re:What nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Taking a shower to relax and unwind has also helped solve many a coding problem. (insert obligatory jokes)
Re:What nonsense (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, taking a smoke break back in the day during the work day often lead to coding breakthroughs...
I miss smoking....
Re:What nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
For particularly blocking SQL problems, I find it helps if I go have a crap.
A data dump?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:What nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
While you may or may not be joking, I know I've actually had it happen before where I've spent a week or more on a problem at work and eventually had a dream about coding the solution. After typing it up the next day, it worked. I'd be surprised if that didn't happen to other people.
I'm highly dubious. While some people can read in their dreams, there is no consistency within the dream. For example, if you were to type up code in your dream and glance away for a moment, when you looked back at your screen everything would be different.
Re: (Score:2)
While you may or may not be joking, I know I've actually had it happen before where I've spent a week or more on a problem at work and eventually had a dream about coding the solution. After typing it up the next day, it worked. I'd be surprised if that didn't happen to other people.
I'm highly dubious. While some people can read in their dreams, there is no consistency within the dream. For example, if you were to type up code in your dream and glance away for a moment, when you looked back at your screen everything would be different.
posting AC to avoid burning a bunch of mod points. I use dreaming solutions to problems as one of my core competencies. It just kind of happens. Problems can obviously be worked during work hours, but it they get too complicated and require heavy duty thinking - yup, I just let my brain work it out, and last dream of the night it happens.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
eventually had a dream about coding the solution. After typing it up the next day, it worked. I'd be surprised if that didn't happen to other people.
Chemist August Kekulé claims to have come up with the benzene structure in a dream.
My experience differs. I really got into the whole lucid dreaming thing years ago, and tried solving problems in my sleep. I came up with all these brilliant ideas in my lucid dreaming state, but on waking they were revealed to be impractical or have serious errors. Turns out that when half my brain is inactive, I'm really stupid. It did give some insight into how some people live their waking lives though.
Yes, dream
Re: (Score:2)
I go to sleep and I don't have the solution.
I wake up and now I have the solution.
Problem: I cannot invoice for the time spent coming up with the solution.
I've also solved code problems in my sleep (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've woken up in the middle of the night with a brilliant solution to my coding problem, enthusiastically wrote it down on a notepad, and went back to sleep.... only to realize (when fully awake, the next morning) that my brilliant "solution" made no sense at all.
I think programming while asleep is a lot like singing while drunk -- you may think you're doing a great job, but that's because the part of your brain responsible for recognizing bad performance is offline :)
Re: (Score:2)
TBH that's how I thought about half of the episodes of Voyager were actually written.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Last night I dreamt of trying many different bolts in a threaded hole. None would fit. It didn't seem like coding.
Re: (Score:2)
I dictated LaTeX to Dragon NaturallySpeaking in the early 2000s when my RSI prevented me from using a keyboard. It may have been passable at processing dictated text, but it was horrible at anything punctuation-heavy. I don't think voice recognition in the 90s was up to handling PERL unless you repeated everything three times.