Dreamento: an open-source dream engineering toolbox for sleep EEG wearables

Abstract

We introduce Dreamento (Dream engineering toolbox), an open-source Python package for dream engineering using sleep electroencephalography (EEG) wearables. Dreamento main functions are (1) recording, real-time monitoring, analysis, and sensory stimulation, and (2) offline post-processing of the resulting data, both in a graphical user interface. In real-time, Dreamento is capable of (1) data visualization, scaling, and navigation, (2) power-spectrum analysis, (3) automatic sleep scoring, (4) sensory stimulation (visual, auditory, tactile), (5) establishing text-to-speech communication, and (6) managing annotations of automatic and manual events. The offline functions aid in post-processing the acquired data with features to reformat the wearable data and integrate it with non-wearable recorded modalities such as electromyography (EMG). Dreamento was primarily developed for (lucid) dreaming studies. Nevertheless, its applications can be extended to other areas of sleep research such as closed-loop auditory stimulation and targeted memory reactivation to enhance memory consolidation during sleep.

Keywords

• EEG
• Lucid dream
• Open-source
• Python
• Sleep
• Wearable