The real-life Inception headband lets you control your dreams, but experts fear zapping the brain with a $2,000 device could hinder cognitive skills during waking hours

An AI tech startup wants you to trade regular dreams for a headband that will let you monitor your nighttime wanderings in a lucid dream-like state.

Prophetic is releasing the $2,000 Halo AI headband in 2025, which will give wearers unprecedented control over their dreams, allowing users to grapple with existing issues they face in their waking lives.

The headband uses electroencephalography (EEG), which records electrical activity in the brain, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by measuring blood flow.

However, experts are not yet sure what the long-term effects might be and warn that using high-frequency sounds to zap your brain could hinder our cognitive ability to process short-term memories.

Experts fear that lucid dreaming could have negative long-term effects, including causing increased levels of stress and anxiety

‘We are rarely lucid in our dreams. And not being lucid may be part of or required for any effective function of dreaming,” Professor Mark Blagrove, a sleep and dream researcher at Swansea University Sleep Laboratory, told me. Science focus.

The EEG and fMRI work together to create a detailed map of the brain to induce lucid dreaming, which is a dream state in which the person is aware that they are in a dream while they sleep.

Prophetic uses the EEG data to determine when the wearer has entered REM sleep and then uses the fMRI to induce lucid dreams and “pursue the answers to life’s biggest questions,” the report said. place.

REM, or rapid eye movement, is the state of deep sleep when a person begins to dream, and the headband can emit high-frequency sounds to stimulate brain activity so that it induces, supports and influences lucid dreaming.

The Halo device will induce lucid dreaming once the person has entered the REM sleep state

‘It is likely that the sound stimulation could induce the high-frequency brain activity associated with clarity,’ says Professor Mark Blagrove, a sleep scientist at Swansea University and co-author of The Science of Art and Dreaming.

‘Noise stimulation has been used to induce low-frequency slow waves during slow wave sleep, so the proposed method is credible.’

The wearer doesn’t have to do anything to induce the lucid dreams, but “it will happen autonomously while you wear the headband,” Prophetic CEO and co-founder Eric Wollberg said in a demo video describes how the Halo works.

The caveat with the new AI technology is that scientists don’t know what would happen to a person’s brain if it were constantly bombarded with high-frequency sounds.

REM sleep cycle is when you are in the deepest part of your sleep and begin to dream

The Halo AI Headband will be available for purchase in Fall 2025 for an estimated $2,000

Scientists believe that dreams serve basic functions essential to our cognitive development, including processing emotional experiences, and some fear that if dreams are altered it could disrupt the purpose of the dream.

Lucid dreams can also have damaging effects on a person’s reality and resemble nightmares and sleep paralysis.

According to the Sleep Foundation‘Prolonged and intense lucid dreaming can overstimulate the dreamer, leading to increased stress and impaired sleep.’

“In the popular media, everyone talks about how lucid dreaming will change your life, and (how) it’s so amazing… (But) almost no one talks about dangers or caution,” Nirit Soffer-Dudek, a clinical psychology researcher at Ben – Gurion University of the Negev in Israel narrated BBCspeaking about the negative effects of lucid dreaming.

“I think there needs to be more caution when it comes to thinking about who this is good for and who it’s not,” Soffer-Dudek added.

Prophetic opened a beta testing application for its Halo headband last week, but is giving priority to people who have already placed a pre-order deposit to receive the device.