Dust Systems
Dreams change us. We change dreams.
Get early access to the DUST app, plus lullabies, exclusive insomnia support courses and wind-down tools from world-class scientists and sleep researchers.
DUST changes how you sleep, what you dream, and who you are when you wake up.
Work featured in
"Dream Engineering is #1 most powerful idea of the 21st century."
We founded the field.
Remember, record, and understand your dreams with the Dust app.
The Dust app is now in private beta for iOS. Sign up to be notified when access becomes available.
Expanding through partnerships
Industry leaders helping us extend the field of dream engineering across media, consumer products and clinical applications.
Thesleepindustryisbuiltaroundrings,mattresses,andsleepscores—butnoneofthemcantellyouwhetheryournightwasterror,stress,joy,orhealing.
Meanwhile 74% of Americans report stress-disrupted sleep and frequent nightmares 3x risk of dying before 75.
Thenightisthelargestunaddressedfrontierinmentalhealth.
Wehavethesciencetochangeit.
"I’ve been surprised to discover for myself that my own dreams are not in fact as boring or unremarkable as what I first thought. For years, I’ve basically written off an entire aspect of myself…"
Anand Jagatia, Reporter, BBC World Service
"Dormio may have the power to save millions of lives"
William Shatner, Captain James T. Kirk, Star Trek
"Concentrating so hard on the experience of dreaming and having that guided experience had the effect of long lucid-dream training concentrated into a single night."
Laura Rysman, Reporter, NYT
"I think a dream to an insomniac will always be a gift; and these dreams in the dream bed in particular felt so special to receive. It brought me right back, for the first time since, to a month-long period of full color."
Grace Greenwald,
Woodworker, Educator
"I dreamt of trees. Many kinds of trees from different points in my life, connecting me to places and events from another time. Since my at-home dream experiment, I haven’t looked at a tree the same."
Karen Van Kampen,
Science Journalist
"It quickly became impossible to dream as anything else but Hamlet. In addition to learning the entire text with little effort I found that my experiencing was more easy and truthful than I had ever felt before"
John Bambery,
Actor, The Met Opera
“In dream states, we seem to be able to link things together that we normally wouldn’t connect, It’s like there’s an artist in my brain that I get to know through hypnagogia.”
Paul Seli,
Professor, Duke University
“For the past year, I used lines of poetry as seeds to guide my dreams. What bloomed was a garden of dreams wilder and stranger than any reading experience could have conjured.”
Will Dowd,
Writer, Boston Globe
“The most impressive thing for me is the speed, super fast, 1/4 second images. And I feel I really needed it, like I was going in an unknown hard drive of my mind, and staying with what things I like. To check myself. With this experience you better understand the connections that make the world for you meaningful.”
Nicolas Becker,
Oscar Winning Sound Designer
“My Dormio-assisted adventures in hypnagogia showed me how unbelievably, compulsively, naturally, and irresistibly creative the mind becomes once it slips loose of conscious control.”
Michael Clune,
Author, New Yorker
"The number of dreams I’m able to recall has increased, usually it’s 1 dream a night but now it’s 2-3 dreams per night"
Awu Chen,
CEO of SOOOUL
- “I was missing my mother fiercely. She’d died about five years ago. It is still hard for me to understand how someone you love can disappear. I set my intention as I had learned in the app, I wanted to see her in a dream. And I did. I was walking with her. She was perhaps in her sixties, still strong, carrying three bags of groceries. I was a little behind her. I came up beside her and said
“Mom, can I help you?” She didn’t speak, but she let me take two bags. It was enough simply to walk beside her.
I woke up so happy to have seen her, joyous really.”
Susan H,
Lawyer
"In just the first night of using Dust I could remember my dreams in more vivid detail. In the first week I remembered my dreams every single night. Dust makes every night something to look forward to and is a powerful tool for self reflection."
Sam Kirschner,
VP at Village Global
“In 3 out of 5 days I’ve woken up remembering vivid dreams, and they’ve stuck with me through the day.”
Dan Welsh,
Broadcast Journalist, BBC News
- ### “I definitely wake up a lot quicker and feel sharper when I’ve had the dreams. It feels very refreshing.”
Dan Welsh,
Broadcast Journalist, BBC News
“I would almost compare it to dreaming with sort of jet fuel in the dream. I feel like it really lit this fuse that made the dream stranger, more evocative, more immersive, and more exciting.”
Will Dowd,
Artist and writer
- “Dreaming can be a life raft for somebody who is immobilized...The Dormio project...really helped me to cope with that restriction because after a dream that was seeded by this poetry I really felt that I had got out of the house, that I’d taken a rejuvenating walk, that I’d gone out, not into the world, but into a world and come back.
To be completely frank, art is the reason I’m alive right now.”
Will Dowd
Artist and writer
In our MIT studies, we guided 92% of people to dream of a specific topic chosen before bed.
See what people dream
"Fork" dreams
A real dream report taken from our Targeted Dream Incubation study at MIT, where we incubated the dream theme "fork" into participants' N1 sleep.
Designing sneakers in a dream
Odell Beckham Jr. used our Targeted Dream Incubation tools to create new Nike × Xbox designs.
Playing a game from the inside
Steve Saylor, a vision-impaired gamer, chose to dream inside his favorite video game. Full immersion in a chosen world.
Target Areas
Dust’s technologies are focused on three verticals.
Dreams for creative joy
For centuries we’ve known dreams can strike and give sudden creative inspiration. We’ve shown you can guide your dreams purposefully towards the challenges you’re working on now, and boost creativity.
Dreams for mental health
The feelings we have in our dreams influence our waking mood. What if you could lower the stress and increase the joy you experience every night?
Dreams for learning
Science has shown that what we dream about predicts what we remember the next day. Reactivating memories at night can influence what we forget and what we don’t. We’re building tools to make this process simple, and put it in your hands.
Science Collective
We’re constantly making new things in the name of research and culture change around dreams. These people make it happen.
Dr. Robert Stickgold
Professor of Psychiatry, Principal Investigator Harvard Medical School, Center for Sleep and Cognition, BIDMC
Dr. Michael Grandner
Clinical Psychologist & Associate Professor, Insomnia Treatment The University of Arizona
Dr. Pilleriin Sikka
Neuroscientist, Anesthesia Dreaming Pioneer + Collaborator Stanford University
Dr. Pattie Maes
Professor, Principal Investigator MIT Media Lab, Fluid Interfaces Lab, Center for Neurobiological Engineering
Dr. David Eagleman
Neuroscientist Stanford University, The Center for Science and Law, Inner Cosmos Podcast
Dr. Leslie Ellis
Registered Clinical Counsellor Inward Bound Counseling, Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Author, “A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy”
Dr. Michelle Carr
Professor, Principal Investigator, Dream Engineering Laboratory University of Montreal, Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine.
Dr. Westley Youngren
Principal Investigator, The Nocturnal Investigations of Traumatic Experiences (NITE) Lab The University of Missouri - Kansas City
Dr. Karen Konkoly
Post-doctoral researcher, Cambridge University Northwestern University Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz
Co-founder, DUST Research Affiliate, MIT Media Lab, Harvard Medical School Center for Sleep and Cognition
Tomas Vega
Co-founder, DUST MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Lab, Tactical Hybrid Ecologies Lab
Guided by visionaries
Our advisors are scientists, artists, and educators pushing the boundaries of human experience.
Dr. Carsten Höller
Artist creating immersive, perception-altering experiments. Venice Biennale 2026.
Dr. David Eagleman
Neuroscientist exploring perception, time, and senses. Founder, CEO, NeoSensory.
Dr. Pradeep Sharma
Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation Director of Arts, Culture and Heritage. Former Provost and Chief Academic Officer (RISD).
Larry Berger
CEO at Amplify, Ed Tech used in 4,000 US school districts. White House Fellow, Rhodes Scholar.
Martin Schneider
Managing Partner at Fine Capital Partners, Board Chair at IDEO.org
Precious Okoyomon
Artist weaving poetry, ecology, and living art. Venice Biennale 2026.
Rodney Mullen
Legendary skateboarder, engineer, innovator, entrepreneur and the Godfather of street skating. Inventor of the kickflip, heelflip, flat ground ollie. Founder of Almost Skateboards.
Experiences
We’re using dream science to build art and culture as well, because dreams are so much more than what we can measure in a lab.
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Discover what your dreams could be made of
Get early access to the DUST app, plus lullabies, exclusive insomnia support courses and wind-down tools from world-class scientists and sleep researchers.