Science Solitaire

[Science Solitaire] Here they come: Ads in your dreams

Maria Isabel Garcia

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[Science Solitaire] Here they come: Ads in your dreams

Illustration by DR Castuciano

'[A]dvertisers can enter your dreams to implant ideas in your head – ideas that will make you more likely to like and buy their products or services'

What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he sells you his wares in your dreams? 

Awake, when reading something interesting, I get distracted, confused, and annoyed when an ad pops up or the article gets divided by ads. And because being online has become one of the main channels where we “stream” our lives, the only refuge is when we switch off or when we sleep. But that should have been the headline last year. Now, companies have started to stream the dream versions of their ads so they are piped into our sleeping lives. 

They use the term “targeted dream incubation.” This means that advertisers can enter your dreams to implant ideas in your head – ideas that will make you more likely to like and buy their products or services. It sounds like a movie you have seen before but it really is now being done and tested by a number of companies. It is very real that it warranted a group of leading dream researchers to issue an online letter warning that: “As sleep and dream researchers, we are deeply concerned about marketing plans aimed at generating profits at the cost of interfering with our natural nocturnal memory processing. Brain science helped design several addictive technologies, from cellphones to social media, that now shape much of our waking lives; we do not want to see the same happen to our sleep.”

How do they do this? There is a part in our sleep cycle, the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage, where what we sense during that stage could more likely influence and shape our minds when it comes to our conscious behavior, including our choices of what to buy. For the trial that was revealed, the “subjects” agreed while they were awake to have the soundtrack of a product ad play when they fall asleep. But with many people now falling asleep with app-curated music or even just free-play of music online, what would keep companies from deliberately paying for the placement of ads in those virtual spaces so they can access and invade our dreams?

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Every time we enter sleep, we enter four sleep stages that in total last about 90 minutes. So when we sleep, especially at night when we sleep longer, we have about six to seven cycles. It is in the early stages of REM that we become highly suggestible.

Sleep has been scientifically proven as “sacred” – it is something you do not want to mess with since it is at part of the core of human health. It means getting too much of it, too little of it, disrupting it are directly tied to how you will function and behave. This is because it is in sleep where the brain does, among other essential jobs, its “Marie Kondo” thing of deciding what is important, and therefore will keep, and what is not, and therefore do away with. It is also in sleep where information you have accumulated in your head finds connections between and among them that are not likely to happen when you are awake. So if you let others with their own commercial agenda mess with this part of your life, what would be the state of your waking mind, if it had been lined and layered with purchasing prompts from companies while you were asleep?

A recent article in Science magazine did a summary of related studies that will give you a sense of why we should not brush this aside as just an alarmist thing. Our brains can really be hacked to morph us into creatures of darker natures. Part of our nature are our natural tendencies to give in to many things. Social media business models have been doing it through their algorithms during screen time and we are all scrambling for how to say “stop and rethink” through court cases, policy regulation, and science and tech columns. And as the old Cherokee saying goes – the one who wins is the one you feed. Now, a door has opened for billboards to mount themselves in our sleep – in the EDSA boulevard equivalent in our dreams. Now, we even have to take extra measures to secure the sanctity of our own sleep.

So, again, what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he sells you his wares in your dreams? Your will, your soul. – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire.” You can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.

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