What's New
1) A volume boost switch for noisy environments. 2) Volume optimization for iPad/iPod Touch devices. 3) Touch playback confirmation of recorded words. 4) Minor bug fixes.
App Description
Featured on CNN, USA Today, and the New York Times. Developed at Harvard and MIT, Sigmund allows you to influence the content of your dreams. Sigmund adapts the most advanced scientific studies of dream modification (via during-sleep verbal stimuli) into a user-friendly app. You influence the content of your dreams by selecting verbal stimuli to be played during your REM-phase sleep, below your waking threshold. Visually strong verbal stimuli, such as "beach, orange tiger" as well as personally-meaningful subjects that relate to activities, people, and places, such as "date, girlfriend, Paris" are especially likely to be incorporated into your dream content during sleep, and Sigmund allows you to select from thousands of recorded dream elements.
“Sigmund builds off of pre-existing sleep science to help people ‘program’ the content of their dreams from a list of 1,000 keywords…'Inception’ anyone?'” – CNN
“Developed at none other than Harvard and M.I.T., which is where you would look if you wanted to find people capable of remote brain control.” – New York Times
“Meet Sigmund, the app that influences dreams.” – USA Today
“Seeing as how 'Egyptian' is a pretty specific term, I'm willing to believe that this dream was more than a coincidence.” – Yahoo Tech Writer Glenn McDonald
“You could hire a dream specialist to sit beside your bed and whisper dream-altering commands at you all night long, or you could pick up Sigmund…If you've ever wanted to parachute into a castle with a camel, then the Sigmund iOS app is for you.”- CNET
"Our eight-year-old son...no longer remembered the nightmare but, to my surprise, reported instead waking to dreams of castles and dragons and 'heroes.' He further reported it 'wasn’t like a dream dream,' but it was 'cool' because he felt he was 'in charge.'"- Yahoo News Tech Reporter Lisa Caplan
Sigmund is the only App in the App Store that allows you to select from and broadcast *actual recorded spoken words* during REM sleep, below your waking threshold. Actual spoken words are the only verbal stimuli that research has shown to be capable of influencing dream content (Journal of Sleep Research, Schredl, et al., 2009).
Scientific Research
Research has shown that external stimuli presented during sleep can affect dream content, thus reflecting information processing of the sleeping brain. The effect of various kinds of sensory stimuli on dream content has been studied, including sinus tone (Dement and Wolpert, 1958), personally-meaningful spoken words and names (Berger, 1963), neutral words (Hoelscher et al., 1981), and olfactory stimuli, such as the scent of flowers (Schredl, et al., 2009). Overall, dream studies indicate that some kind of information processing of external stimuli is present during sleep. In 1963 the British Journal of Psychiatry published the seminal study in this field, “Experimental Modification of Dream Content by Meaningful Verbal Stimuli”, which undertook a controlled experiment in which tape-recorded spoken words and personal names were randomly presented below the waking threshold to sleeping subjects during the rapid eye movement phase of their sleep-cycle. The study found that when dream recall was elicited afterwards, the “stimulus appeared to have been incorporated into the dream events” (Berger, 1963). Incorporation rates of the verbal stimuli into the dream events ranged between 35% and 45%.
At Iris Sky Labs we realized that with the advent of smartphones—which fundamentally are programmable computers capable of broadcasting pre-recorded sounds at pre-determined times—it was now possible to re-create the essential experimental conditions of these sleep studies and dream research in the comfort of a user’s own home.
iPhone Screenshots
(click to enlarge)
App Changes
- April 08, 2012 Initial release
- April 10, 2012 New version 1.0.1
- April 10, 2012 Price decrease: $4.99 -> $2.99
- April 16, 2012 Price decrease: $2.99 -> $0.99
- April 27, 2012 New version 1.1
- May 02, 2012 New version 1.2
- May 24, 2012 New version 1.3
- July 31, 2012 New version 1.4
- November 29, 2013 Price decrease: $0.99 -> FREE!