Scientists have the tools to influence your dreams, and here's how

The thought of someone being able to influence your dream while you are asleep is an unsettling one, but it's completely possible regardless of how you feel about it.

In fact, MIT researchers and scientists have already successfully done it. According to OneZero's Tessa Love, who revealed that MIT scientists are currently working on a Dream Lab that can "hack" people's dreams through sounds and smells. The MIT scientists are concentrating on hypnagogia, which is the experience of the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. The scientists believe through their research that they can influence our sleeping minds so that when we wake up, we feel we are "better".

Dream Lab researcher Adam Horowitz said, "People don't know that a third of their life is a third where they could change or structure or better themselves. Whether you're talking about memory augmentation or creativity augmentation or improving mood the next day or improving test performance, there are all these things you can do at night that are practically important."

The researchers are using a glove-like device called Dormio. This device is equipped with multiple sensors that monitor muscle movement, heart rate, and electrical conductance of the skin, so it knows where were are located in our sleep state. When Dormio notices that the wearer has entered a hypnagogic stage of their sleep, it plays an audio cue and then records anything the person does in response.

An example of the scientists successfully being able to influence a person's dream is when Dormio played the word "tiger", and the person proceeded to dream about felines. Researchers were able to find out that these cues could improve dreamers' performance in creative tasks. The researchers also believe that pumping out a fragrance for the person dreaming could lead to the softening of traumatic memories that appear in nightmares.