Can an iPhone App Influence Your Dreams? Meet Dream:ON

How wonderful would it be if you could monitor and control your dreams for a healthy life? Well, the developers of Dream:ON seem to agree.

Apparently scientists are experimenting with the smartphone app to devise ways of monitoring the user's sleep cycle and patterns of dreaming - information that could influence physical and mental health.

How Does "Dream:ON" Work?

Just before you go to bed, think of the kind of dream you'd like to have and when you want to wake up. Then place your iPhone by your bed and go to sleep. The app then begins monitoring your sleep patterns. When "Dream:ON" senses you are dreaming, it plays a soundscape that has been carefully designed to help create your desired dream. While your chosen soundscape is playing, Dream:ON continues to monitor your movement and adjusts the volume accordingly, to ensure you are not woken up.

"We have created a new way of carrying out mass participation experiments. We still know relatively little about the science of dreaming and this app may provide a real breakthrough in changing how we dream, and record and track those dreams," said Professor Richard Wiseman, quoted on the app's official website.

Apparently every individual has different sleep patterns and research has shown that most of our dreams occur during REM sleep. In addition, it seems your mind is most alert to other senses during this stage of sleep. Dream:ON is designed to play the soundscape to your subconscious during REM sleep. Research further suggests that people have varying abilities to incorporate the soundscapes into their dreams and it could take several nights before Dream:ON becomes effective.

Features:

• Free and fully functional smart alarm.
• Graph showing movements during the night.
• You can tag friends who appeared in your dreams, via Facebook, and even share and compare notes about each other's dreams.
• You can post short descriptions of your dream to the experimental Dream Bank, which aims at creating the largest repository of its kind in the world.

You can get research updates for the app from Twitter: @DreamONapp and download the app here.