A few months ago I had the pleasure of meeting Eric Wollberg, Founder and CEO of Prophetic, a startup I have been following since their Inception (yes, that was a pun about dreams).

Prophetic is working to create a wearable device to stimulate one’s sleeping mind into lucid dreaming. Prophetic is nothing short of visionary.

What is a lucid dream?

It’s when you’re asleep, dreaming, and able to control your actions whilst dreaming.

Early in 2023 I was in a pretty intense work sprint and hadn’t been getting as much sleep, this seemed to somehow lead to lucid dreaming for a few days straight.

It was amazing.

I could interact with people, walk around, build things, and felt I was actually present in my dream yet I somehow seemed to realize I was dreaming.

It was an experience I won’t forget.

95% of people who lucid dream in their life, like myself included, may only experience it a few times in their life. Eric on the other hand, experienced it many times from the age of 12 through college where he honed his ability to induce lucid dreaming.

“At my zenith I was lucid dreaming twice a week, then [leaving college] I went into the real world where that routine was harder to keep up,” Eric explained in the episode.

Eric never forgot about these experiences, he got deep into the field’s frontier research by people like Dr Stephen LaBerge. In the episode Eric describes himself as a curios mind, someone who goes an inch deep and a mile wide. This mindset took him across a variety of business roles at multiple startups and led him to spend time in Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem, Eric explained to me he spent a lot of time reading religious texts, writings from and of prophets of various beliefs. One thing that struck Eric about the prophets he read were the commonality of where they received their visions: from dreams.

What’s enabling Prophetic’s Halo

In following lucid dreaming and neuro research closely, Eric began to piece together the idea for a device that could combine a few technologies to create a device to induce lucid dreaming called “Halo”.

First, transcranial focused ultrasound, utilizes ultrasound waves to precisely target, deeply penetrate, and reduce off-target effects compared to electrical brain stimulation.

Studies from as early as 2014 have shown that transcranial direct current stimulation works to slightly increase odds of lucid dreaming. The Prophetic team believes the gap between a much larger leap in increased odds of lucid dreaming lies in the ability to stimulate the brain more closely to data seen via EEG in brains that actively lucid dream.

The issue is translating this EEG neuro-data to a format that a transcranial focused ultrasound device can utilize, this is where a recent breakthrough in neuro-transformers come in.

Neuro-transformers, working much like a traditional ML transformer can process EEG neural activity for advanced neural decoding. These technologies combined facilitate the artificial recreation of neural activities associated with lucid dreaming.

You can watch a wonderfully produced keynote from Prophetic detailing their plans or read their technology roadmap for more information.

What will this mean?

It’s hard to predict, this is unprecedented and new frontier of innovation and discovery.

Eric believes the ability to lucid dream on demand will be as transformative to humanity as our discovery and innovation around fire. Enabling the exploration of reality may give us the tools we need to dive deeper into our understanding of consciousness and life itself.

This all sounds grandiose and a bit over the top, but lucid dreaming is truly life changing. The ability to call it on command would be world changing.

Keep on building the future,

— Jason

Filmed in New York, NY | Edited in San Francisco, CA | Composed in Davis, CA