Can Dreams Become the New Intellectual Property?

Dreams were a major part of my childhood. Mostly, because they felt weird. Sometimes, the moon would fall into our home’s courtyard, or the witches would fly around the sky, or I’d see all the planets in the solar system revolving over my head.

Honestly, it isn’t any different now. The conversations about how peaceful the silence feels, the eureka moments with ideas around tech, and fighting for my values; this is what I dream about now. No wonder, I’ve been called a very peaceful sleeper. What’s more satisfying than the alignment of conscious and subconscious?

There’s a plethora of literature on the power of the subconscious mind.

Sigmund Freud, often referred to as the father of psychoanalysis, proposed that dreams are a manifestation of our subconscious desires and unresolved conflicts. Carl Jung also saw dreams as a way to communicate with the unconscious mind, which he referred to as the collective unconscious. On the other hand, Calvin Hall saw dreams as reflections of the dreamer's waking life, incorporating both conscious and subconscious elements.

During my Vipassana Meditation retreat last year, I would wake up thinking about the meaning of my dreams and explore the subconscious for the next 10 hours meditating every day.

Just like the gray areas in the understanding of the subconscious, there are mixed emotions and reactions around engineering it. The general public still shies away from conversations around the subconscious, mostly because of its stereotypes against consciousness gurus, astral travelers, and psychedelic therapists.

The biggest problem with that is that it disincentivizes innovation. I believe that curiosity and motivation drive action. And in the presence of fear, the two often take a backseat.

Who wouldn’t want to harness all the creativity in their subconscious? But the fear of the unknown holds us back.

Imagine if you could store your dreams and understand where they come from. Imagine if you could transcend all the boundaries of space and time. Imagine if you could answer all the questions. Imagine if you could forget anything you wanted to.

Capitalism holds the key to breaking free from fear by inducing the fear of missing out. The stakes for losing the value that can be from dreaming are higher than simply the fear of the unknown.

I’m surprised that there are no marketplaces to trade, tokenize, and explore dreams. Humans have always been obsessed with dreaming.

In ancient Mesopotamian culture, dreams were often considered divine messages. People created religions and cults by sharing their dreams. Egyptians and Greeks believed that dreams were significant and held divine meanings. Dream-sharing was a common practice among the elite and priests, who sought to understand the gods' messages. The practice of dream incubation involved sleeping in sacred places to receive divine dreams. Dreams played a crucial role in the Bible too.

During the Renaissance, dream-sharing became a topic of intellectual curiosity. The Japanese Obon festival honors the spirits of ancestors, with some rituals involving dreams as a medium of communication with the deceased. Yoga Nidra is still practiced in many parts of the Indian Subcontinent.

Unfortunately, with the rise of sleep tech, the focus has shifted to the quality of sleep over the contents of dreams.

But, combining the two can not only revive human creativity but also unlock immense value.

Companies like Prophetic AI are working on stabilizing and inducing lucid dreaming. Story Protocol enables the tokenization of IP. But a collaboration of the two can truly change the tech industry forever.

Tokenized dreams can create a whole new marketplace for IP ownership.

The sleep score can work as an authenticator of originality, and the contents of the dreams can work as the unique stories each individual can share. The contents of the dreams can be explored by capturing the brainwaves in the dream state and then further decoding them combined using dream analysis engines and human retrospective accounts.

There is hardly any way to steal anyone else’s dreams. The originality of the dreams can:

• Provide datasets

• Facilitate novel ideas

• Solve creative problems beyond the dimensions of logic

• Enable a new form of collaboration by sharing and inducing dreams

• Allow to leverage absurdity to unlock new experiences

• Create a market for the new form of IP

It is absolutely insane that nobody talks about the amount of creativity lost in the process of forgetting a dream.

Moreover, incentivizing good sleep will lead to better physical and mental health globally.

Many inventors and scientists, including Elias Howe (inventor of the sewing machine) and Friedrich August Kekulé (who discovered the structure of benzene), have reported gaining insights from their dreams. Forgetting dreams can mean losing out on innovative solutions and ideas. Similarly, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that his famous poem "Kubla Khan" was composed during a dream. Salvador Dalí's surreal paintings were often inspired by his dreams.

It is time for humanity to rise above mediocrity and think original thoughts. It is time to think differently.

The only solution to mediocrity is curiosity. The only way to revive the tech industry is to break free from the status quo. We need to reward innovation and curiosity over success. The only way to build a better future is to be a rebel!

And the only way to keep dreaming is to make a dream last!

Do you remember your dreams after you wake up? What is your all-time favorite dream?