Lucid Capitalism

Every night my brain decides to put me back in a classroom where I can’t remember a poem I was supposed to have memorized, or in a supermarket that keeps rearranging itself so I can never find the exit, or being chased through someone’s back garden by something I can’t quite see. Whatever I’d been hoping for—some flying, some sex, a visit from Megan Fox—has been quietly swapped out for bureaucratic anxiety in a setting from 1997. I wake up tense and mildly humiliated.

A Japanese developer apparently decided this was a solvable problem. The app is called Yumemiru—yume wo miru, "to see a dream"—and the pitch is exactly what it sounds like: pick a scenario before you fall asleep, let the software monitor your sleep cycles, and at the right phase it plays a targeted soundtrack meant to steer your unconscious toward whatever you requested. Flying, riches, breaking out of the friend zone, robot pirates—the developers say yes to all of it. The app is in Japanese only, which limits the audience somewhat, but it’s free, and conceptually it’s one of the more audacious things I’ve seen anyone try to do with a phone.

I’m skeptical the way you’re skeptical of anything promising to optimize something as wet and chaotic as a sleeping brain. The distance between "plays ambient audio during REM" and "delivers custom fantasies on demand" is probably wider than the description implies. But I appreciate the ambition. Most productivity software at least pretends to work on the waking mind. This one is going straight for the source.