Dreamstage

Designed in 1977 by sleep researcher J. Allan Hobson with photographer Theodore Spagna and MIT composer Paul Earls, Dreamstage was a public exhibit built around a real sleeping subject, visible to an audience through a one-way mirror. Electrodes recording the sleeper’s brain waves, eye movements, and body movements fed live data — rather than ordinary paper polygraph traces — into a system that converted the signals into colored laser light patterns projected on the surrounding walls and synthesizer-generated music that shifted with the sleeper’s own movements and dream states. First shown for six weeks at Harvard’s Carpenter Center in 1977, the same year Hobson and Robert McCarley published their activation-synthesis model of dreaming, the exhibit drew more than 10,000 visitors, toured as a six-city road show, and later formed the basis of the Dreamstage Sleep and Brain Science Museum Hobson opened on his farm in East Burke, Vermont.