In the early 1980's, Tyco furnished a small device called the REM Syncopater, that very nearly resembled an answering machine of the era, a decade and a half before the introduction of voice mail. The device consisted of beige plastic and to be honest, looked less than fantastic and only slightly functional, with two buttons for play and pause along with a standard mechanical alarm clock that had been shrunk in size to accommodate the size of the casing. Perhaps because of its lackluster appearance, or due to a poor marketing and advertising campaign, the small machine collected dust on the shelves of independent toy stores, selling only to a handful of confused adults who were performing last minute shopping for their nephews, nieces, or godchildren.
However, the workings of the REM Syncopater were based on a series of cassette tapes that had to be purchased individually for somewhere around the price of 9 to 12 dollars. After a brief perusal of the instructions, the user attached child-safe electrodes to their head just above the ears before preparing for sleep, and let the tape roll. The cassettes played on a loop, leaving it up to either the user's discretion to halt the progress of the "experience" or up to the settings of the miniaturized alarm clock. Ideally, the electrodes, which I reiterate were completely child-safe, allowed the user to stimulate dream-centers in the sleeping brain using crude manipulation of alpha, beta, and theta waves; leading the user down a path of programmed dreams based on the features of each cassette. Since this was indeed meant as a child's toy, the tapes were generally geared towards rather unimaginative explorations of cliche child themes, with dream programs for fighting dragons in a castle, or for sailing with famous pirates. The girl-orientated cassettes invovled tea parties with princesses and escapes into unicorn fields, and the rather ho-hum tape entitled "Own Your First Pony."
While the creative nature of the device may have been lacking, and furthermore, was completely forgotten with a halt in production due to the increasing popularity of early video games, there existed groups of scattered converts who professed that the REM Syncopater, in fact, worked like a dream. However, they were quick to profess also that the effects were not exactly exact nor even orientated towards the purported themes, but had nevertheless substantially augmented their nighttime experiences. One of the former users of the device, a psychologist who had played around with his child's version in a series of unofficial experiments, claimed that the electrodes touched off a series of phantom sensations in his body while he remained half-asleep, which were so powerful that he attributed the sensation to "flying amid dark fields of cherry trees, after dipping down from the clouds in order to alight on an impossibility." Invariably, he deduced, and quite correctly, that the unreliable nature of the cassettes was actually based in the manufacturer's purposive mislabeling of the contained experiences, which he verified at a later date using collections of Polar Adventure and World War Two Fighter Pilot. Each Polar Adventure tape was in fact geared towards the probability of a homosexual dream encounter, while World War Two Fighter Pilot involved the intricacies of a crack-house residency. He became of course, suitably and morally outraged, as any father of two would be.
And yet, Tyco's REM Syncopater lost the seed of its infamy and its questionable virtue as a piece of technology when in 2010, a series of ebay auctions granted the toy a somewhat new distinction as a desirable collector's item invoking themes and consideration of past retro fads such as Spin Art or the rather macabre Teddy Ruxpin. Among the new owners of the toy was a Finnish electronics engineer, who beyond being mechanically and electronically inclined, decided to overhaul the magnetic tapes in order to create a more desirable experience that was personally tailored to his own whims and fancies. Soon, he was traversing dreamscapes that involved having exquisite lunches with King George the II, sentencing Adolph Hitler to the gas chamber (as was his wish) and performing numerous series of deft sexual escapades that he kept secret from his wife of twelve years. It could be said that his modified Syncopater became the best thing to ever happen to him, and it was not strange for the man to down sleeping pills at odd hours if only because he had become so heavily invested in the experience.
As is often the case with the fantastical or at least unregulated, models of these toys inevitably became invested with political and business dimensions. After almost thirty years of relative obscurity, the designs and projected usages for Tyco's model were reviewed by curious companies and governments, who saw long-term potential for both profit, new forms of advertising, voting manipulations, and even education. The new design, produced by Apple in prototype quantities only (called the iDream) is entirely digital and no more obtrusive in physicality than a standard MP3 player. A database similar to the popular iTunes will be completed by the end of 2011's fourth fiscal quarter, allowing users to download dream experiences that vary from playing musical instruments in popular bands to single-handedly saving the world from nuclear catastrophe using psychic powers. These packets of sleep experiences will be available for around the price of a standard DVD.
Of course, there are those who venture that such a business model is only conducive to psychic manipulation, pointing out that there are sure to be implanted subliminal messagings that addict the user to the Apple brand experience of dream. One critic even pointed out that such a device could shake the moorings of social reality to the point where dreams become so realistic, or at least more desirable than standard waking reality, that people lose their investments in being human. Apple Public Relations issued the statement in response that they would be certain to manufacture a series of experiences that lent waking life a kind of normalcy, with grounding dreams and even dreams that make stagnant experiences seem joyous by comparison. "Currently, the state of dreaming constitutes an anarchy. We are poised, as were the frontiermen of old, to expand order along this vast territory, to further the cause and cooperation of civilization, and to have fun doing it."
Rumors circulated by Lulzsec indicated the existence of pirate programs, used for counter-capitalist purposes involving dissemination of poetic, artistic, and revolutionary dreams. Independent media groups have also supposedly cultivated a brand of dream that informs the user outside of models of corporate philosophy, experiences that in effect show the dreamer the value of creating sustainable gardening options for low-income communities residing in supermarket deserts, the meaning behind Bakunin's socialist revolutionary rhetoric, and even an experience that exposes the truth of various banking cartels and their roles in warfare throughout history. The dreams themselves could potentially be downloaded for free by interested parties from the internet. Also rumored is the existence of programing software that allows the user to cultivate their own dream experience, much in the manner of the Finnish engineer.
Government watchdog groups have already discussed the prospect of creating a legislative body used to control labeling of dream programs, along with keeping certain dream experiences from being possessed by minors. While discussed in the House of Representatives, the implementation of dream laws remains to be instituted, especially due to a new debate regarding the new distinction between licensed and created dreams versus the old biological and unregulated natural experiences. Howard Langston, Republican House Minority Leader, said in effect "We want to get our citizens on a program that will insure their cooperation as free and democratic people for the rest of their lives. The way I see it, there were too many problems with our father's and grandfather's dreams, which were experiences that could not be controlled nor safeguarded against unwarrented intrusions. While they may not have realized it, nature made them sick in a sense, while we are about to be safeguarded from the effects of chaotic sleep for generations to come."
Self-proclaimed maverick psychologist, Philip Togut, summed up his fears and hopes for the technology in an academic article printed by the Brache Institute for Jungian Analysis. "The root of the problem, as I see it, is that dreams are valuable albeit hallucinatory experiences that impart sustaining visions of archetypal knowledge as it is contained in humanity's collective unconscious. Dream manipulation, in a sense, is nothing new; we perform similar actions every time we turn on the television or go out to the movies. The question I want to ask is 'How is our knowledge of current technology that exhibits psychic manipulations going to translate to this new apparatus?' Will it help to save us, or will it damn us? Using parallels from the existence of television, I see the new movement into controlled psychic behavior as ultimately damning, noting that current news stories are cultivated to lend senses of passivity and fear to the minds of an over-stimulated mass of people, that every couple of minutes some large corporation without a sense of human decency or of psychological boundaries is releasing advertisements that have been conscientiously and immorally geared towards finding new ways to get consumers to spend their money. Did television producers and the owners of stations see potentiality in the existence of their now familiar technology? I think not, because otherwise we would already have television channels that gave people free college educations, paid for in part by the necessary evil of advertising. We would have stations that gave people information regulated to increasing their livelihood through the imparting of information necessary to trades and economic augmentation. We would see programs that investigated and informed us about the mysteries of the world around us, that would settle our fears and prejudices through programming about people from different parts of the globe, people with different values. And yet, where this dream technology is going, I can assure you, we don't necessarily want to be, as I am certain it will be at best a one-dimensional space that divests us of the mysteries of our nighttime travels while in effect filling our minds with nothing but psychic junk."
And yet, planned production on the iDream continues, bolstered by favorable stock market activity around the world. Steve Jobs released the following statement "I see a future of renewed intimacy between Apple consumers and our company. And in response to the flurry of criticism of our product, you can rest assured that the device will always feature an on/off switch."
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