Would you sleep with this headset that can give you lucid dreams?

A couple of new, scaled-down electroencephalogram devices are being marketed as sleep correctives and lucid dreaming devices set to take users to places where anything is possible. Maybe true, but it’s also a feeder program for grander project.

Lucid dreaming follows a spectrum. Everyone from cognitive neuroscientists on down now acknowledges it. The basic idea is that if you can wake up — to some extent — inside your dream and, to varying degrees, take direction, there is probably a way to enhance and prolong that experience.

In a way, in theory, it is the ultimate video game. And you’re the console.

Selling your dream time to direct-inject advertising schemes may appeal to many.

If the team behind the new lucid dream company is representative of the techno-pharmaceutical-religious zeitgeist in the California Bay Area, then perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by its moniker: Prophetic.

What could go wrong? Why wouldn’t you want to share the utmost intimate details of your subconscious, which may or may not have important relationships with the divine soul?

What's in it for them?

Prophetic's interface devices, called Phase and Dual, are not in any way prophetic, of course. In fact, the irony is how predictable is the endeavor to mix dreams, tech, and vibes as the latest quick profit for the expendable income crowd.

The company website and X account share very little of the bigger picture — and it’s this bigger picture, with the implicit long-term profit motives and strategies (almost always related to data acquisition) that is really revealing.

We can glean a peek. When I queried Google for a deeper dive, I was informed that Prophetic’s “data collected from the headsets (EEG data, sleep metrics) is used internally to refine their AI models, including the Morpheus-1 neurostimulation model.” Google linked to an article indicating that “Morpheus-1 will use 'transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation,' a non-invasive way to modulate brain activity using high-frequency sound waves beyond the normal human hearing range.”

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Christian Vierig/Getty Images

So as in the case of Pokemon Go — wherein users chased phantasm characters on a screen while, unbeknownst to them, their adventures were unpaid labor, traversing urban canyons to harvest geospatial data for a much longer-term robotics play — data collection from lucid dreaming essentially creates a local, spatial grid dataset, of the kind applicable to robots working independent of GPS. “Prophetic induces lucidity by sending safe, low-intensity ultrasonic energy through the forehead and into the prefrontal cortex,” the website notes. “This area of the brain is naturally downregulated during normal non-lucid dreams. And it is upregulated during lucid dreams.”

I can do this job in my sleep!

Down in section 15(b) of the terms of service offered for the Dual and Phase devices, we find the following: “THE CLAIMS MADE ABOUT SPECIFIC PRODUCTS AND SERVICES HAVE NOT BEEN EVALUATED BY THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION.” But if it’s not a food and it’s not a drug, what sort of body should be doing the evaluation? Or is your brain in its most vulnerable state the new Wild West?

Caution in strapping an unapproved, largely unproven device to your head for eight hours a night is advised, we hope, obviously. And perhaps the data collection winds up serving some grander purpose related to human well-being. However, Prophetic is set up with a potential captive audience, one in a very particular, ultra-submissive emotional condition.

It may seem impossible today, but with a certain rejiggering of the economic expectations and realities in first-world countries, the notion of selling your dream time to direct-inject advertising schemes — or still more transactional purposes — may appeal to many.

For the luxe early-adopter, nihilism-is-dead crowd, the promise of optimized add-ons for REM, for performance enhancement by way of programming subconscious, may offer an extra appeal, even “better” than the real thing of waking life.

And speaking of add-ons, how long until the Prophetic machine can interact and/or control parameters to “participate” in the ultimate human intimacy of our dreams? Is a scheme for that already being tested?

Perhaps in the final phases of the schemes related to human neurological alteration and “improvement,” we lovers of novel experience (and often blindly willing guinea pigs) will have the option of taking into our innermost selves sales pitches and propaganda for the tools and substances we use to distract us from our spiritual shortcomings. But, what’s more, we soon may want (or need) to consider working not one, not two, but maybe even three or four jobs — wage job by day, “gig economy” side hustle by night, and yet another, and another, and another in your dreams!

And so we pioneers forge ahead into a future where such obsequious degradations of the human spirit grow ever more feasible — and potentially more preferable to even worse options.