No longer able to escape through words on a page, Will Dowd used a prototype device called Dormio, developed at MIT. Before he could fall into deep sleep, Dormio would wake him up and allow him to record his unhindered thoughts.
Will Dowd spoke to WAMC's Lucas Willard.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
"It plays at the exact moment that your most kind of your brain is most suggestible a pre-recorded prompt which you've chosen. That prompt it doesn't wake you, but it does enter your dream, and it incubates the dream. That's the term they used. Incubation, as in, I think of it as like it plants a seed, and then that seed, whatever that you know, Dormio has delivered to you through your you know through your ears, that audio phrase, that suggestive phrase, then grows into this hypnagogic dream. Then what Dormio does is it can also sense right before you're about to fall into like deeper sleep where you would you know forget what you've been dreaming of, and it wakes you up with this really cool gong sound, it immediately starts recording, so you can groggily say what you've been, what you're seeing, what you've been dreaming."
Willard: Do you remember the first dream that you had while using the Dormio device?
Dowd: I do, I do. So I, I, um, I remember this dream. It was, it was seeded by a line of poetry recorded by, um, you know, one of these dead poets that I used, Padric Colum, who was an Irish poet, and the lines were just about sort of seagulls circling a tower. The dream I had was I was on a beach. There was a tower in the distance, but I was approached by this kind of harlequin magician-like trickster figure who sort of offered to make me his apprentice, kind of a magician's apprentice, and I could sort of choose whether or not to accept this mentorship or not. But what was interesting was that afterwards, when I woke up and I recorded it, I then listened to the rest of the poem, and the poem was about a poet in a in a tower, and a young girl goes because she wants to be mentored, and and the kind of master poet tells her, you know, I think you should, you know, actually I don't think you want to be my apprentice. I think you you need to take flight on your own. So this whole theme of kind of mentorship and whether or not to accept that was just completely coincidental between the dream that I had and and the rest of the poem, but in a larger sense, I remember it specifically because this this trickster figure meant a lot to me in retrospect. Because I found during my year that dreams have a very tricksterish quality. One of the stories that I really enjoyed earlier in the book is the centipede. It wasn't about a centipede, but it was about a little girl who's also a witch, and then she grows up, and then she sees runners running by her house, and that resembles a centipede. But there's nothing in the prompt about a little girl or a witch. Those sort of came up on their own.
Willard: Now, when you went back and was able to look at your notes and your recordings of what had happened when you were woken up from your dream, maybe the next day, did it surprise you? Did you maybe not remember what you were saying with what you came up with? Was it totally wild and in in some ways kind of foreign even to you.
Dowd: Absolutely, it was a you know a year of continual surprise, and the dreams were completely completely bizarre. Ultimately, when when I looked at when I compared the the dream seed and then the kind of tree that grew from that seed. I I can certainly see the seed. The seed was always there, but never in a controlling way. I find that the dormio input was able to kind of torque my dreams, sort of maybe you know push them in a certain trajectory. But at a certain point, the dream had its own agenda and took over and took me into places that were much more wild and imaginative than I could have planned. And in fact, it's somewhat strange to hold the book now because on the cover, I'm credited as the author. And of course, I did I did write the stories, but I don't feel that I came up with them. The stories are much stranger than I could have invented, you know, in my waking life. The part of me that's talking to you right now, and so I feel oddly as if there was a co-author. I can't. I don't know what that co-author should be called. Whatever the dream weaver is in the back of our minds, I don't know what that is. It's it's mysterious. But yes, the stories certainly the seeds influenced them. But what they became are as much a surprise to me as they are to to somebody who picks up the book.
Willard: After you were done with the project, did you miss the Dormio device? And have you ever revisitedit?
Dowd: Yeah, of course. And I've I've I've actually never stopped and and using it. And I should say something that I'd love to tell people because if I can imagine if I was listening to this interview, I would think I want one of those MIT prototype gloves that you know barely you know there's only a few in the world and they're like you know these mystical things you'll never get. How I'd be so jealous. Well, you know, do not fear because people have you know humans have always known that this hypnagogic state is unique in terms of how it can boost your creativity, and so some of the some of the truly genius minds like Dali and Edison and Poe used this state very intentionally, but they didn't have they didn't have an MIT glove, of course. But what they did is they used something a kind of cruder technique called the steel ball technique, and that's when you hold a ball like you know something heavy like a rock or a key in your hand, and then as you enter that hypnagogic state again, that hand relaxes. You then release the ball or the key. It hits the ground and wakes you up, so you it prevents you from falling off of that cliff into deep sleep. So you're woken up and you can remember and recall what your unhindered mind has made of the question or the prompt you went into that state with.