The number of insights that can emerge from a calm, meditative state on any particular topic is astounding. We’ve all experienced flashes of insight during a shower, a walk, or a nap. Many historical breakthroughs throughout human history have occurred during meditation or dreams.
The idea for Google Search famously came to co-founder Larry Page in a dream. As a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, Page was struck in the middle of the night by a vision that he had managed to download the entire web and keep only the links. Upon waking, he immediately wrote down the concept, which became the foundation for the algorithm that would power Google Search. (From Perplexity, source: Yahoo)
Here is a quick list of other inventions which came in dreams/meditation (generated using Perplexity):
I have been studying the connections of dreams and the subconscious to creativity, healing, synchronicity etc. through a 5+ year long project called Numaverse . I have come to realise the advantages of having a new mode of research where multiple people meditate on a topic and share insights on the same, tapping into the collective consciousness. It is an unconventional way to investigate a topic, but it essentially involves a dream/vision sharing paradigm.
Here is how it works:
1) A topic is selected before a session; eg: improving the efficiency of a sustainable farm.
2) The topic is studied in detail over an hour by a group of 4–7 participants, including group discussions on the topic. (Participants experienced in meditation could possibly give better results during the next step)
3) The group then separately meditates on the topic for a period of 10–30 minutes. Any insight that might surface during the meditation is noted down without disturbing the meditation. For this purpose, a voice to text AI model can be employed along-with the participant wearing a headphone and speaking every insight into it (Read the Dreamcatcher project for process details). For inexperienced participants, a guided meditation can be played through the headphones.
4) The combined insights of different participants are then aggregated and analysed by a moderator. This could also be done using an LLM.
5) The process can be repeated across multiple sessions till satisfactory results are obtained.
The process of sharing the insight/vision/dream together can be done in a communal setting. For the purpose of the same, I envisioned an extension of the Numaverse project, where multiple people can come into a shared-dreaming or a shared-vision system and meditate, called the Numasync. Multiple meditation pods are arranged at the bottom of a sculpture; and at the top is a large screen. As people share their visions in the pods, a live screen at the top creates an evolving generative AI video assimilating the insights together. In parallel, textual insights are generated which can be assimilated and analysed after sessions.
The project was first conceived a year back, and the design iterations and testing is still ongoing.
Follow the project here: