Freud isn’t the only one with an Interpretation of Dreams: writing in 1576, Elizabethan author and astrologer Thomas Hill understood dreams as the raking-through of everyday psychological overloading, and pamphleteer Thomas Nashe later said they were “nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested; or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations”.
Today, our understanding of dreaming – or, as it’s properly known, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep – isn’t so far from these musings: we know that this phase of sleep is biologically necessary and disruptions in REM sleep have been linked to depression. You also need enough good quality slow-wave deep sleep to replenish ‘neural networks’, regulate hormones, regenerate cells and process memory.
Dreem is a fabric headband that goes up behind your ears and across your forehead. It aims to help you sleep better by monitoring, analysing and acting on your brain overnight. The seed of the company, founded in 2014, came from work co-founder Hugo Mercier was doing in applied mathematics and computer science as a student at Paris's Ecole Polytechnique – fascinated by the brain, he began to collaborate with neuroscientists to see if auditory stimulation during deep sleep could enhance memory consolidation.
"What we saw was that by sending auditory stimulation to the brain, synchronised with specific patterns of the brain, we are actually able to enhance the quality of deep sleep in a pretty significant way," Mercier says. Dreem offers a package of solutions to the “sleep crisis” the company sees gripping nations the world over. In the UK, Dreem says, one in three adults doesn’t get enough sleep, and other reports suggest the average adult loses the equivalent of one night’s sleep a week.
And Dreem reckons it’s got one potential solution. The company just closed a major round of funding, bringing the total raised over the past four years to €60 million, after a further €31 million was secured at the end of June. There are four key things the headband does: first, it gets you to sleep 30 per cent faster using an ‘air’ setting that synchronises your heart rate and breathing, and a meditation-like feature called ‘flow’ that floats abstract words to stop your mind whirring on the day’s events. "If we think that the person is falling asleep, we will stop the exercise of meditation, and keep the relaxing background sounds," says Quentin Soulet de Brugière, co-founder and CTO of Dreem.
Second, it nurtures deep sleep using 'bone conduction' to send sounds into your brain, bypassing your ear. Third, it wakes you up at the right moment by judging when you’re in a lighter phase of sleep – being woken up during deeper stages is disruptive. Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, it gives you accurate information about your sleep and suggests things you can do to improve it – more on this later.
Working with an advisory board that includes sleep experts Emmanuel Mignot and Russell Foster, at Stanford and Oxford Universities respectively, Dreem measures brain activity with dry polymer EEG electrodes, before analysing this information on an internal CPU. Micro-vibrations transmit “pink noise” directly to the inner ear, improving slow wave (deep) sleep. (Pink noise, as opposed to flat frequency white noise, is noise of a density most often found in nature – like in whale songs.)
There is recent evidence evidence that “acoustic enhancement” improves memory retention in those aged between 60 and 84, which builds on research showing that sleep deprivation in the young can inhibit the ability to encode and consolidate memory, and that slow wave sleep can be nurtured by acoustic stimulation. Older people sleep differently: theirs is more interrupted, with reduced slow wave and REM sleep, and requires separate investigation.
"We have a global population which is not sleeping well,” says Mercier, emphasising the effects of poor sleep on short and long-term health – the correlation between a lack of sleep and cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative and mental disorders. “You have the impact on health but also on the global economy – last year for example in Europe, countries lost between €200 and €300 billion because of bad sleep [via productivity losses], and in the US it was $400 billion," Mercier says.
But to really take off, the Dreem headband, which currently retails for €499, will need to come down in price. The team is also working to develop the science and technology by which it’s underpinned, validating everything in clinical trials; they want to be trusted. They also hope to make the headband more discreet – though the current version, designed by Yves Behar, is pretty minimalist, with buttons that mean you don't have to be on your phone late at night.
Can proliferating neurosis about sleep really be healthy? Sufferers of insomnia report panic about sleep as one of the primary things keeping them awake, an insight supported by Guy Meadows, whose work suggests that sleep gets further off the more a person pursues it. Sleep, some argue, is the new crusade in the wellness industry’s ambitions to ‘disrupt’ health and wellbeing. According to political economist Will Davies, author of The Happiness Industry, “the human brain has become viewed as a piece of machinery (like a computer) that needs tending and improving, so as to make it more productive and less likely to suffer some kind of breakdown".
"Meditation, mindfulness, neural supplements and various 'mind-hacks' are areas where this is going on," Davies says. "Sleep is the latest frontier of this ideology... In the long run, it's a recipe for greater anxiety and stress, seeing as it makes us responsible for everything that we do, feel and achieve. The paradox is it could ultimately make it harder to switch off, rather than easier."
What's causing us to sleep so badly? According to Foster, its causes are multiple: the increasing intrusion of bright-screen technology erodes sleep duration; increasing anxiety, work and social demands are all taking their toll. For some, the need to undertake shift work and the casualisation of labour is having bad effects, along with the fact that the demands of childrearing tend to be borne by fewer people today, as families contract. Health problems like neurodegenerative conditions and obesity, and the use of excessive stimulants like caffeine and alcohol, all play a role in the so-called crisis. That's a lot for a headband to tackle.
What is, though, absolutely distinct about the Dreem is that it accurately measures different phases of sleep and provides tailored advice – a major breakthrough. This may be its key selling point, Foster says, as well as what will help researchers, because so many tools on the market give users false insights about their kip. About nurturing deep sleep, he was initially sceptical but has changed his mind: “there's possibly something in this... it's still experimental, but it is looking as though, by syncing the soundwave delivery to the brainwave activity, you can enhance slow wave sleep and therefore in this elderly population like the younger population, increase cognition and the retention of memory. And that I think is very exciting."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
