London: A smartphone app known as 'Dream:ON' can now help individuals create their perfect dream and so wake up feeling happy and refreshed.
It monitors the sleep and plays a carefully crafted 'soundscape' while a person starts dreaming. Each soundscape is carefully designed to evoke a pleasant scenario, such as a walk in the woods, or lying on a beach etc. These sounds in fact influence people's dreams.
Richard Wiseman, Professor of Hertfordshire University teamed-up with app developers YUZA to create 'Dream:ON' in 2010. Wiseman used the app to conduct a two-year study into dream control. The users at the end of a dream had to submit a description of their dream through the app. This app was downloaded over 500,000 times and the researchers collected millions of dream reports. After studying the data, Wiseman discovered that the soundscapes did indeed influence people's dreams.
"If someone chose the nature landscape, then they were more likely to have a dream about greenery and flowers. In contrast, if they selected the beach soundscape, then they were more likely to dream about the sun beating down on their skin," said Wiseman. The researchers discovered that people's dreams were especially bizarre around the time of a full moon.
"Having positive dreams helps people wake-up in a good mood, and boosts their productivity. We have now discovered a way of giving people sweet dreams, and this may also form the basis for a new type of therapy to help those suffering from certain psychological problems, such as depression," highlighted Wiseman.
