Video dream recorder (continued)

Days ago, I made a quick visit to Japan and spent 48 hours in Chiba, near Tokyo, to experiment Dr Yatsuda’s “Dream Helmet” as he likes to call it. Instead of staying at a local hotel, I spent the first night at their laboratory’s building, in a very nice and comfortable bed, inside an air-conditioned, sound-proofed room. After a delicious yakitori and sushi washed down with a bottle of “Asahi Super Dry”, I watched some TV before being outfitted with the helmet, hooked up to the monitoring devices while I was wondering why in the world I was doing this. Once I was all set up, I was totally exhausted by the long journey, the frenetic activity and quickly fell asleep. I woke up a few times, mostly because of jet lag and also due to the rather cumbersome headgear, but slept fairly well, and in the morning woke up pretty well rested and in my usual good mood. After downing a quick glass of water, I went for my morning run, not too far from an Ikea store where the Funabashi “ski dome” used to stand. I went sightseeing in Ginza for the rest of the day and returned to Yatsuda’s office around 4 pm. His team welcomed me inside their small conference room and started to show me what they had “extracted” from the helmet during my sleep. They had pieced together four of my dreams. Each segment ran between 2 and 6 minutes and was visual enough to show what went on through my head while I wasn’t in control of my thoughts; they were quite a few “blanks” and a few imaging errors, the quality was average and the flickering caused by the automated editing a distraction, but the result was nonetheless impressive. Do I need to say that that these videos were senseless? All dreams generally are; only Carl Jung could have perhaps been able to makes head and tails out of them, but I just couldn’t. In viewing the four pieces they were many things I couldn’t believe I had thought. Since the project is still hush-hush, I couldn’t take a copy of the recording with me, which explains why it’s not posted on this blog. At any rate, the test was interesting but perhaps not quite worth the long and tiring journey. Until the process improves significantly, I’ll try to do a better job at remembering my own dreams…