Taking the Bizarre Seriously: Dreams as a Material for Interaction Design

Sleep technologies promise optimised sleep by tracking sleep cycles or by affecting sleep environment. This paper expands sleep technology to address more complex notions of sleep, proposing dream technology as a path for reflective practices that focus on nightly dreams rather than hours slept. Because dreams are ‘bizarre’ and hard to grasp we turn to speculative design practices in an RtD framework to investigate the nature of dreaming. This process produced the ‘dream sticker machine’, a design proposal that visualises a user's dreams with an AI image generator. This tangible dream trace becomes sharable in both public and personal spaces. This proposal formed the basis of a probe to how people might imagine their dreams taking form in the real world, and led to ideas for how the materials of dreams might be taken up as part of design research practice.