Silly Invention Idea: Dream Remembering Device

[AlP]

I've been reading about dreams in my psychology textbook. As we sleep, we go through various stages. We dream during a stage called "rapid eye movement" (REM) sleep. There are two things that must happen to remember a dream. First, you must wake up during REM sleep, i.e. while actually dreaming. Second, you must stay awake for at least a few minutes otherwise next morning you won't remember the dream or even that you woke up.

The device I propose would do the following. I can't find anything on that is similar. It's kind of like an alarm clock except instead of ringing at a certain time, it monitors which stage of sleep you are in via an electrode attached to your head. When it detects that you are in REM sleep, it waits for a while as you dream and then starts ringing. Then you wake up and press a button. At this point it stops ringing and starts counting down from 5 minutes. When it reaches zero, you can go back to sleep.

In the morning you'll remember your dream! If they had something like this at thinkgeek.com I'd buy it instantly.

[iNow]

During those five minutes, it'd be a good idea to write down as much as you can remember about the dream.  When we wake up from dreaming, we can remember it for a while (as you seem to know), but that memory starts to fade very very quickly.  So, by writing it down, not only can you look back on it later for review, but you also train your memory to get better at storing the dream information... until shortly later you can remember pretty much everything in your dreams... all just by practicing and writing down what you've dreamt.

Interesting idea about the device, but you're going to be super tired, super cranky, and lose some intelligence/memory abilities if you keep waking yourself up while dreaming.  

[AlP]

Yeah I guess the device would have to carry a health warning. And it would be better if it came with advice on how to better remember dreams. I was thinking you might occassionally use it on weekends when you could afford to sleep in to catch up on the lost quality sleep.

[Chimera]

That sounds pretty neat. Sometimes I have really odd or interesting dreams that I wish I could remember, but only bits and pieces stay in my memory.

[Heretical Rants]

I'm writing a book of dreams.

[LoneMateria]

This reminds me of something I saw in a magazine when I was like ... 8.  There was an eye-mask that shined 2 red lights into your eyes and this was supposed to let you control your dreams.  The thing proally caused eye cancer or something but this thread reminded me of it.