Yumemi Kobo
Japanese toymaker Takara has announced a dream machine. Called Yumemi Kobo ("dream workshop"), the device has a voice recorder, light array, fragrance dispenser, timer, speakers, and a stored library of background music. Before bed, you sit down with the 35-inch device and show it a picture of your desired dream state and then record several key phrases into the unit. Then, head down, sleep time until your REM states kick in when the machine whirs on, emits some of a specified fragrance (apparently the researchers have figured out a number of scents which are conducive to the dreaming environment as well as the ambient background music) and, over a soft lullaby of the background music, intones your key phrases.
The device currently doesn't support biofeedback states (which make it difficult for the machine to determine if you are actually in REM state before it starts doing its magical mystery tour), so you had better hope that your cycle is the same as the cycle which the designers envision. Since the units aren't scheduled to be available until 2005, Takara has some time yet to get that individualized kink worked out.
I'd pay good money for one today. My dreams -- what fragments there are -- are strange beasts which hold me down. We come out of sleep states at such odd intervals that sometimes I feel like I am drowning in some semi-lucid state which I can't quite physically get out of. And I can never remember them seconds later. Dream 'gators, I'm telling you. Strong jawed beasts which vanish beneath the waters as soon as you manage to break the surface.