A new wearable called "Aurora" could let users lucidly control their dreams, and it's already surpassed its crowdfunding goal.
The Aurora headband, made by a startup called iWinks, detects when wearers have entered REM sleep, when most dreams occur, and emits a series of audio and visual cues that supposedly let you know you're dreaming without actually waking you up.
That way you can actually win that fight or get away from whatever's chasing you - the possibilities for dreamers are theoretically endless.
And Aurora is well past its Kickstarter goal of $90,000 (about $54,000, AU$101,000) and still has 19 days to go.
Hush little baby, don't say a word
The headband differentiates between different kinds of sleep by tracking your brain's EEG signals and using an accelerometer to track head movements. It's reportedly the first such device to read EEG data.
Two types of prompts should alert dreamers that they're dreaming: pulsing LED lights in the headband, and subtle noises triggered on users' nearby smartphones.
That feedback will be customizable as well, and iWinks will eventually make the API widely available, allowing for even more possibilities.
And never mind that noise you heard
"You'll be in a dream, really unconscious to what's going on around you, and all of the sudden, you'll see the lights," iWinks co-founder and hardware engineer Daniel Schoonover explained to Venture Beat.
He continued, "You can do whatever you want right then."
The four members of iWinks are so far the only people who've actually tested it, but they said that with some "tinkering" they'll hopefully get it to work right "for most people."
Contributing $175 (£105, AU$196) gets you a headband of your own when they start manufacturing them.
