All I have to do is dream, dream, dream

A dream is a wish your heart makes.--W. Disney

Sometimes dreams are enjoyable. Sometimes they're scary. Most often, for me at least, they're just sort of exhausting. But most of all, they're random.

But not anymore. Just buy the proper app for your iPhone and you can program your dreams, just as you program your music on your iPod. So a CNN article reports.

The app, called Sigmund and costing a mere 99 cents, lets you choose from a list of key words that your iPhone will then whisper into your ear, over and over, during the times of the night when Sigmund calculates you'll be most likely to experience REM sleep.

Young people who have used the app report that it works well, but sometimes more subtly than expected. A Harvard student entered "running" and "mountains," and had a satisfying dream about running in the Sierras. But a Yale Law School student remarks:

... one night, I entered the words: "black cat." I did not dream about a black cat. I had a very vivid dream of walking around Paris in the evening with a girlfriend. But, at a decisive moment in the dream, a black cat appears and watches us silently.

Once awake, he enjoys reconstructing his dreams and discovering what his mind did with the whispered cues.

"Fascinating," as the Yalie notes. But perhaps a bit creepy, I wonder?

Mr. Huxley had the idea, if not the technology, figured out back in 1931.

"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"

Of course, these quiet whispers in sleeping children's ears, described in Brave New World, were used by government to create proper attitudes -- not by the sleeper himself to shape his own entertainment. But how big a gap, really, is there between the two uses? Why not an FTC regulation requiring the app to insert a few patriotic murmurs? And why not add a few subliminal commercial announcements as well, a word from the sponsor before your nightly dream program commences?

The article does not explain how the app came to be named "Sigmund," but I suppose that can be left as an exercise for the reader. Pleasant dreams.