In early December 2020, Xbox released a series of promotional videos called “Power Your Dreams”. The plot of the ads is based on the scientific achievements of lucid dreaming investigations that were published in the autumn issue of the Consciousness and Cognition magazine (we reported on the articles this magazine published on the use of VR technologies in the phase and the new device for dream control).
The protagonists of the videos are gamers who took part in an experiment on visualizing lucid dreams. Participants played an X-Series console and then entered a state of hypnagogia (an intermediate state between sleep and wakefulness) using the special Hypnodyne tracker that scientists often use in their research. In this state, they were asked to describe their dreams.
The events of their real lucid dreams were then brought to a life in a video series shot by famous directors, the first of whom was the Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Taika Waititi. He visualized the dream of the player and blogger MoonLiteWolf, titled “Lucid Odyssey.” In this video, a girl travels to fantastic places in her lucid dream with a luminous rabbit directing the plot of the dream.
On the YouTube channel of the game console manufacturer, you can also watch a video of how the dream tracking experiment itself took place with the participation of the players. While the “experiment” raises some questions, we now know for sure that Microsoft has turned its attention to lucid dreams.
What do you think they might have planned?
