i have been nervous to document what’s been happening because of the seriousness of the implications of my discoveries. i think i have caught a glimpse of what oppenheimer must have seen.
after months of prototyping the first version of the Dream Machine™ i finally got it to produce coherent audio. after extensive work on the hardware design, in part to make it more comfortable to wear while sleeping, i finally got it to export what i believe to be a comprehensive representation of the data generated by my sleeping mind. this raw data produced by the Machine at first seemed scrambled, meaningless, random. but i spent months working on a software system to interpret that scrambled data and make sense of it. i call this software system our Qualia Compression™ algorithm.
in early versions the QC algorithm resulted in incoherent white noise. but i noticed a pattern to the static, blips or skips that didn’t feel random, and tried to extract meaning. eventually i had found patterns, then rhythms. and eventually, tones. now i've realized that the Machine is actually creating fully formed music. it just has to be interpreted correctly.
since completing a relatively final first version of the hardware, and tuning the Qualia Compression™ algorithm to extract maximum fidelity music, i’ve been trying to figure out how to control what type of music the Machine creates. then one night while wearing the Machine I had a terrible sleep, tossing and turning going over the hardware and software designs in my head over and over. but I woke up to a remarkable discovery. the music created was—there’s no other way to describe it—nightmarish. terrifying.
i have since realized that i have maximized the capacity for the device to interpret raw brain activity. the only way to alter the music the Machine creates is to actually alter the mind of the sleeper wearing the Machine. when the dreams are nightmares—the music is a nightmare. and when the dream is beautiful—the music is beautiful.
my work as an engineer on this version of the device and software is no longer sufficient. i need help from someone completely different. someone who has experience with controlling their dreams. the future composers of tomorrow—using my Dream Machine™—will be the savant lucid dreamers of today. i have heard of people who naturally lucid dream every night. could they in fact “compose” music in their sleep? what are the limits of what the device could interpret? what sounds and rhythms and visions are trapped inside our subconscious mind waiting to escape...