Can We Engineer Dreams? with Adam Haar Horowitz

Can you influence what you dream about tonight? Are you spending years of your life in a world you don’t recall? Can nightmares be manipulated as a therapy? Are dreams sometimes predictive of changes in your health before you become aware of them? Join Eagleman with Adam Haar Horowitz, a neuroscientist and dream engineer who spends his working days trying to help people during their night time.

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Horowitz, A. H., Esfahany, K., Gálvez, T. V., Maes, P., & Stickgold, R. (2023). Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance. Scientific reports, 13(1), 7319.

Horowitz, A. H., Cunningham, T. J., Maes, P., & Stickgold, R. (2020). Dormio: A targeted dream incubation device. Consciousness and cognition, 83, 102938.

Nina Bai (2024). Anesthesia Dreaming. Stanford Medicine.

Haar Horowitz, A., Grover, I., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Breazeal, C., & Maes, P. (2018, April). Dormio: Interfacing with dreams. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-10).

Westley Youngren, Emma Angle, Victoria West Staples, Sarina Soligo, Adam Horowitz, Michelle Carr, Guillermo Bernal, Michael Grandner, Robert Stickgold. Exploring Dream Self-Efficacy’s Relationship with Suicide, Sleep, Volume 48, Issue Supplement_1, May 2025, Page A516, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaf090.1195

Konkoly K, Appel K, Chabani E, et al. Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep. Current Biology, 2021; 31, 1417-1427.e6

Brandão, D.S., Scott, R.N.B., Soares, E.S. et al. Dream content and slow waves benefit prey against predator in a video game confrontation. Sci Rep 16, 9331 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-42759-7

Helen Thomson (2026). It’s your perception of sleep that’s making you feel tired all day. New Scientist.

Michael W. Clune. Night Shifts: Can technology shape our dreams? Harper’s Magazine.

Eagleman DM, Vaughn DA (2021). The Defensive Activation Theory: REM Sleep as a Mechanism to Prevent Takeover of the Visual Cortex. Front Neurosci. 2021 May 21;15:632853. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2021.632853

Inner Cosmos Episode 11: What does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet?

Inner Cosmos Episode 51: Why do brains dream? (Sleeping & Dreaming Part 2)

Eagleman DM, Vaughn DA (2020). Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains. Time Magazine.

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