Corporations Are Testing Ways to Advertise to Us in Our Dreams
Every day we are under a constant barrage of advertising, as some estimates say the average person can see up to 10,000 ads in a day. Now, are the advertisers coming for our dreams?
Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “[D]reams are the touchstone of our characters.” But for some companies, dreams might be the touchstone for advertising their products.
According to theHUSTLE.com, companies like Molson-Coors are conducting experiments to infiltrate your subconscious and make you dream about their products. Last year, volunteers were reportedly asked to watch this strange, trippy video laden with Coors imagery.
The volunteers then went to sleep while listening to audio from the video. Coors wanted to, “shape and compel” the subconscious to dream about their products, and apparently, it worked.
About 30 percent of the participants reported Coors in their dreams. One woman told theHUSTLE she had a series of “weird Coors dreams.” Later she said they were brought into a focus group where she said, “We all felt like lab rats… it just didn’t really sit right.”
This type of suggestive behavior to elicit specific dreams is called “Targeted Dream Incubation,” or TDI.
Where, for example, the brain is trained, while awake, to associate a sound or smell with an item. Then as the person goes to sleep the sound or scent is introduced and the person will dream about the associated item. Sleep researchers argue the treatment aspect of TDI shows many positive implications including helping with depression, alleviating PTSD, fighting addiction, and helping us learn.
But as MIT Ph.D. student Adam Haar Horowitz, said in an interview, “On one hand, dream manipulation is gaining acceptance and has all these great applications…”
“And on the other hand, it’s, ‘Oh sh*t, the advertisers are coming.’”
Coors is not the only company looking into dream ads; Microsoft, Sony, Burger King, and some airlines are reportedly looking into TDI advertising as well.
For now, this is a voluntary practice as there must be an auditory stimulus during sleep for it to work. But some warn with the rise of smart devices, unethical advertisers could send signals through smart speakers in our sleep without us knowing.
In fact, sleep researchers are so concerned, that last year they wrote an open letter signed by nearly 40 scientists, warning that, “[O]ur dreams cannot become just another playground for corporate advertisers.”
Our dreams are the most personal, intimate part of our psyche.
As Robert Stickgold, Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor and dream researcher told theHUSTLE, “All night long, your brain is reprocessing memories from the previous day, connecting them with other memories, sifting through the residue to decide which ones to keep, and stabilizing them.”
“Our dreams are literally creating who we are.”
Boeing Images, Patents of Mothership Appear to be from Area 51
Since the public became aware of the clandestine Area 51 installation at Nevada’s Groom Lake, it has forever been associated with secret advanced technology and extraterrestrials. And now, Boeing’s release of several concept drawings showing a reusable “mothership” spacecraft have provided a glimpse into the type of skunkworks projects developed there.
The Drive’s WarZone, first picked up on the release of these illustrations in January, before dissecting them in a post published a few weeks later.
By analyzing the landscape and apparent model year of a car in the drawings, the two determined the mockups came from the late 1980s or early 1990s. They identified a Ford Bronco and the distinctive hills of Groom Lake, saying these resemblances are almost certainly a depiction of Area 51.
What makes the photos so fascinating is the advanced technology of the spacecraft and its similitude to reports of triangular UFOs seen numerous times in the area over the years.
The illustrations seem to match perfectly with one of Boeing’s patents for a “two-stage-to-orbit” system and depicts a mothership carrying a smaller craft in its undercarriage. The craft’s description says it would be launched on unannounced missions to space and deploy payloads into orbit, before landing at any number of airfields around the world. These capabilites would have been unattainable through standard rocketry, not to mention its design far precedes modern reusable rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
The mothership appears to be propelled by air-breathing jet engines, while the smaller jet contained within it appears to have a scramjet engine – an advanced propulsion system capable of achieving hypersonic flight into space. The craft also seems to have a heat shield on its undercarriage similar to those found on the space shuttle.
Those in the UFO community have pointed out that the smaller, “parasite” craft depicted in the illustrations has a similarity to the infamous TR-3B craft witnessed countless times over the past decades.
According to The War Zone, the craft was likely an experimental product of the Cold War and the government’s desire to gain an edge on the Soviets. But they also said it wouldn’t be a surprise if a concept like this was being revived and updated with modern technology, given recently expressed desires for a space force and the paranoia around space warfare. There have also been pictures that recently surfaced, showing a new hangar at Area 51 without a roof or with a retractable roof, sparking conjecture as to whether some new technology is currently under development.
While the release of these drawings is certainly fascinating, there are still numerous questions left unanswered.
Did this project ever even come to fruition? Is this some type of reverse-engineered alien craft from Area 51? And could this have been the culprit behind decades of mass sightings of a black triangle UFO, a.k.a. the TR-3B?
Furthermore, could this have anything to do with the mysterious triangular object hovering past the ISS earlier this year?
Want more on the strange occurrences at Area 51? Check out this documentary The Secret: Evidence That We Are Not Alone in The Universe:
