9 Amazing Facts About Dreams

You can try to control the content and stickiness of your dreams—if you believe the many new smartphone apps that are available. A recent tool, Sigmund, developed by Harvard and MIT graduate students, whisperingly repeats words that you pick out of a database (beach, flying, mermaid, queen) during your REM cycle (based on predictable sleep-wake times). Another app, Dream:ON uses the phone’s motion-detecting accelerometer to gauge when you’re in REM (you’ll be stick-still), at which point it kicks in with the sounds of your pre-programmed dream—walking in the woods or frolicking at the shore (as examples). No one’s saying app-influenced dreams are exactly like the movie “Inception”—not yet, anyway.