Wait! Technology Can Also Control Our Dreams? Read More!

What is the most sacred place on the Earth where you cannot be disturbed, have no rules to follow, and achieve anything you desire without working hard? The only such place is your dream. Well, this is not sarcasm. In fact, it is the only place where you have no restrains whatsoever. Now, imagine even this place being controlled by someone. Won’t you feel agitated? Some brands have already begun their work on this.

When you are awake, your conscious mind processes a lot of information, and chooses what to absorb and accept, and what to drain out. This is not the case when you are asleep. The brain is naïve enough to believe that dreams are being impacted by your own thoughts, and no external factor. Also, it is quite ostensible that our dreams impact our mood, and hence, our behaviour (including purchase behaviour). An apt analogy for this is being hypnotised to get a task done. This is why brands want to infiltrate and take over our dreams.

The process that has made this possible is Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI), wherein you are made to dream on a specific theme using some external stimuli (smell, sound, taste, light). Remember when Patanjali was born? It had its ad rolling on TV after very second other ad.

Now, imagine that a person is just about to enter Hypnagogia (stage between wakefulness and deep sleep, wherein you dream), and a rhythm from the Patanjali ad is played. The odds of the person dreaming of Patanjali, and hence, interacting with the brand the day after are high. This is TDI.

Coors, an American beer brewing company, conducted a research on a group of 18 people, wherein, it showed them a small movie on a 7-hour long loop, with some soundscapes and Coors beer cans appearing repeatedly in between. Coors, then, asked the study group to go to sleep wearing Dormio, a glove-like device having sensors that measure parameters like heart rate. As soon as the study group would enter Hypnagogia, Dormio would sense it and play one of the sounds from the soundscape.

This external stimulus made the study group dream of Coors beer. Some of them reported dreaming of pogo-jumping among Coors beer cans, or dropping Coors beer cans from a plane for a bunch of cheering people. Now, after Hypnagogia, as soon as the study group would enter the state of deep sleep, Dormio would detect it, and wake them up (though not fully wake up) to record the dream report. This process was repeated relentlessly till the brand had enough information about the process, and its ad.

As per a study conducted by the American Marketing Association, in the next 3 years, 77% of marketers plan to use TDI to influence our purchase behaviour by controlling our dreams. In fact, some brands have already started doing it. Google Hub is already being used for this purpose. Microsoft has come up of ways of making die-heart gamers dream of their favourite Xbox games. In 2018, on Halloween, Burger King rolled out a dark green coloured burger that the brand claimed was clinically proven to induce horrific nightmares. What’s more? Even big names in the Airline industry have begun to explore ways of dream incubations.

By virtue of a study conducted, the smell of cigarettes smoke was combined with the smell of rotten eggs, and was fed to a study group of chain smokers during Hypnagogia. The experiment reduced smoking of the study group by 30% over the course of a week. Instead of using TDI in the interest of consumers like this, brands are busy exploiting the technology. What is frightening is that the technology holds the potential to aggravate addictions to certain products. Dream researchers want the use of TDI to alleviate, else, they fear that the time is not far when people would dread dreaming, or even worse, sleeping.

A study reported that 42% of respondents claimed to have dreamt about Apple, 33% about Nike, and 32% about Amazon. Is it as simple as the consumers thinking and interacting with these brands during the course of their daily routine, which is why they dreamt of these brands? Or have these brands also jumped to the opportunity of influencing our dreams?