event

This event is open to students, researchers, faculty, scientists, artists, writers, and performers interested in the subject of dream engineering. Explicitly anti-disciplinary. Participants are welcome to participate in any or all of the scheduled workshop days.

Register by March 15th HERE
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Dream engineering technologies use neurostimulation, AI, and brain-computer interfaces to influence and extract dream data. While they offer therapeutic and creative possibilities, they also raise concerns about surveillance, data commodification, and exploitation. These technologies challenge the boundaries between subconscious influence, productivity, and rest, potentially reinforcing existing power structures tied to class, gender, and race. The future of dream data ownership and its ethical implications remain critical questions.

Efforts to regulate neurotechnology include the Neurorights Foundation, which advocates for rights such as mental privacy and protection against algorithmic bias. A 2024 report revealed uncertainty regarding corporate sale of neurodata, highlighting the need for stringent protections.

Chile took a step in 2021 by enacting a constitutional amendment for mental privacy. The rise of cyberneurosecurity will be crucial as brain data becomes a tradable asset, potentially exploited by companies. The growing field of neuromarketing, exemplified by Coors’ Super Bowl campaign infiltrating dreams, has prompted neuroscientists to warn against passive advertising in sleep. Capitalism’s push to integrate unconscious thought into market economies threatens to eliminate "unproductive expenditure" as theorized by Georges Bataille.

This raises urgent questions about whether dreams—perhaps our last sanctuary of freedom—are becoming sites of economic exploitation. The history of biopolitical control over bodies, as explored by Jonathan Crary and Grégoire Chamayou, provides a crucial framework to examine how the unconscious is now subject to governance and market forces.