A Japanese toymaker is marketing a Dream Machine which helps sleepers choose their dreams. It sounds a lot like a simple voice recorder hooked up to a brainwave entrainment or mind machine that lets you select musical background and record names and keywords that are played back in some sort of hypno-sleep patter.

Gadget May Help Sleepers Choose Dreams . . . Ever wished you could decide what to dream at night? A Japanese toymaker says it has a new gadget that can help you do just that. Tokyo-based Takara Co. says its "Dream Workshop" stand – shaped like an oversized cellular phone dock and about 14 inches tall – can be programmed to help sleepers choose what to dream. While preparing for bed, the user mounts a photograph on the device of who should appear in the dream, selects music appropriate to the mood – fantasy, comedy, romantic story, nostalgia – and records key word prompts, such as the name of a romantic crush. Placed near the bedside, the dream-maker emits a special white light, relaxing music and a fragrance to help the person nod off. Several hours later, it plays back the recorded word prompts, timed to coincide with the part of the sleep cycle when dreams most often occur. It then helps coax the sleeper gently out of sleep with more light and music so that the dreams are not forgotten.

I’m not clear whether the recorded key words are merely played individually or if they are plugged into some sort of standard patter along with suggestions for pleasant dreams and memory. Either way would probably work as the product itself already acts as a suggestion for the results (can anyone say, "placebo effect"?) so coupling the belief in the product with a few keyword playbacks should be fine.

One thing I don’t understand is the target audience.

The device, which will sell for $136 in Japan starting late August, targets sleep-deprived businessmen, a company official said. "There are many businessmen today who they say don’t sleep because they are too busy. This gadget can be used to help them dream a good dream,” said Takara spokeswoman Mayuko Hasumi.

If the audience is sleep-deprived businessmen, then there shouldn’t be a need for the photo (something borrowed from radionics, no doubt) and the idea of dreaming about a particular person. You would merely need sleep suggestions, not dream programming. In all honesty, the description in the article makes me think the real audience for this toy is horny boys and men who have crushes on women whom they are too afraid to approach or who are unapproachable for some other reason.

The effectiveness of the device doesn’t sound all that promising either:

In a study conducted on a group of men and women between the ages of 20-40, the device had a success rate of 22 percent in inducing dreams in which one of the prompt words appeared, said the Yomiuri Shimbun, a major daily.

For simple sleep inducing suggestions and relaxation, one should be getting a much higher rate of success than twenty-two percent. Even dream programming should be higher than that. If they tweaked the product just a tad to have patter at the beginning of the sleep cycle – an elman followed by progressive relaxation deepeners – then the effectiveness rate would go much higher. They also need to decide what the product is for . . . sleep enhancement or dream programming and then design accordingly and test acccordingly.

In the meantime, folks who want to really work on sleep enhancement and dream programming will find the MP3 files for deep relaxation trigger response conditioning and guided imagery more helpful.