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Your Inner Sleeping Landscape Is An Advertiser's Dream
Advertisers aren't satisfied with merely covering every surface with ads. They also want you to see them in your dreams.
Last year, Molson Coors, the esteemed purveyor of watered-down frat-party beer, ran a jarring ‘experiment.’In a discreet building in downtown Los Angeles, 18 subjects were instructed to watch a strange video featuring a synth-laden soundtrack and natural imagery interspersed with glimpses of Coors Light cans.
The participants were then asked to drift off to sleep while listening to an 8-hour soundtrack featuring audio from the video.
Coors’ stated goal was science-fiction worthy: The company wanted to “shape and compel [the] subconscious” into dreaming about beer.
Shockingly, it seemed to work.
Around 30% of the participants reported that Coors products made an appearance in their dreams.
I'm not sure if I really recommend it, but you can see the Coors advertising dream conditioner for yourself if you want.
In his intensely imaginative way, scientifiction great Edmond Hamilton wrote extensively on dream technology in his 1940 story Doom Over Venus:
Slih Drin now put the spool of tape into the dream-machine’s holder, and touched a switch. With a faint humming, the spool began turning. Gently, the effeminate Venusian plugged the two wires from the machine into the tiny electrodes in Stanton’s skull. He felt a wave of darkness flow through his brain as he rapidly sank into the sleep.“Now I leave you to happiness, sir,” he dimly heard Slih Drin saying, as though from a great distance.
Stanton was already deep in shoreless blackness. Soothing electrical vibrations from the machine were drugging his nerves and brain. Then, slowly, light began to appear in the darkness. It was not really light, Stanton’s fading consciousness was aware. It was only an electrical impulse from the dream-machine that gave his brain the sensation of light.
The principle of the dream-machine was old. Long ago, men had learned that the brain received all bodily sensations as electrical impulses through its nerve-system. They had found that if they produced such electric impulses artificially, and transmitted them into the brain, the brain was deceived by them and experienced sensations which seemed perfectly real. Long research had classified the different electric impulses which brought different sensations to the brain. It was only necessary to transmit such impulses to the brain in correct order, by means of a tape-record, to make the brain experience any desired sensations or adventures.
Clark Stanton now felt himself, in his dream, in a small ship that was rushing at thousands of light-speeds toward a glorious galaxy of millions of suns. But he was not Clark Stanton in the dream — he was a younger, stronger, handsomer man. He was steering his ship right into the colossal swarm of suns. He curved around huge, booming dark-stars, dived past the heads of flaring comets, and rushed breathtakingly through vast, glowing nebulae...
(Read more about dream-machines)
('Doom Over Venus' by Edmond Hamilton)
Roger Zelazny anticipated this idea in his 1966 novel The Dream Master; see the entry for the dream console.
Also, compare this item with the lucid dreamer from Peter Watts' 1999 novel Starfish and the empathy box from Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
Take a look at this extremely well-done article at TheHustle.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/21/2022)
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