“Welcome to the factory of dreams,” said a smooth, Siri-like voice as the clouds sped up and swirled, sometimes turning into Greek sculptures. It’s hard to explain the world I was taken into. Perhaps a meditation class about acid encased in a video game. Still, it felt like a perfectly rational and natural place to be, watching the melting red sunset solidify into pink marshmallows and taking deep yoga breaths as my dream girlfriend Siri instructed me. .
My imagination was lurking across a daisy-studded meadow, but in reality I was reclining in bed at the Kimpton Fitzroy Hotel in London. A luxury hotel in Russell Square has launched a virtual reality “lucid dream” package, capitalizing on one of 2024’s big wellness booms.
Most of us have never actually experienced the joy of lucid dreaming. It is a dream in which you are conscious that you are dreaming. You can very carefully guide yourself through the landscape and even decide what will happen next, rather than being carried away by the story created by your subconscious. Their purported ability to help unravel trauma, solve problems, and hone creative skills is celebrated, but while they are rare, they are, interestingly, more common among video gamers. . For example, I’ve long been jealous of his 25-year-old brother Will, an avid gamer and regular lucid dreamer.
The wellness market is saturated with sleep powders that make you lucid dream, and even eye masks that emit light and sound cues when you enter REM sleep. But the dawn of VR is taking the race to build the perfect lucid dreaming machine to a new level. Kimpton Fitzroy’s service is the brainchild of Charlie Morley, who runs immersive lucid dreaming retreats in collaboration with AI artist Sam Potter.