The next step in dream technology has been unveiled, as one research company has managed to get two people to 'chat' to each other while in the lucid dream state.
Bizarre simulations have shown up exactly what lucid dreams look like, and anyone who has managed to experience one will be able to tell you how unnerving they can be.
However, what if someone was to take things that step further and allow people to communicate and control their thoughts beyond their dreams?
That's the primary aim of San Francisco-based neurotech company REMspace, who have recently managed to not only induce lucid dreaming on two separate test subjects, but also exchange a message between the two while they were in the dream state.
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Michael Raduga, the company's CEO, has announced on X (formerly Twitter) that they have managed to achieve this feat on two separate occasions, boasting it as the 'first-ever communication in dreams'.
The experiment itself saw one individual induced into a lucid dream state, and then a random word - known only to the company and the recipient - was generated and played to the test subject via earbuds.
The subject's response, generated using specially designed equipment, was then stored on a server. After the second test subject entered a lucid dream state, the stored response was then transmitted to them, which was then repeated by the second subject after waking up.
While not strictly a shared dream state nor a direct conversation while both were dreaming, this experiment does represent the first 'chat' achieved between two dream-induced individuals.
In a press release following the event, Raduga proclaimed: "Yesterday, communicating dreams seemed like science fiction. Tomorrow, it will be so common we won't be able to imagine our lives without this technology."
He continued on to claim that "we believe that REM sleep and related phenomena, like lucid dreams, will become the next big industry after AI."
That's certainly a significant claim considering the overwhelming push that AI has received over the past few years, but it's hard to ignore the intrigue that this particular area generates.
Raduga has also argued that these experiments and research "open the door to countless commercial applications, reshaping how we think about communication and interaction in the dream world," and we'll let you decipher exactly what he's prophesizing with that.
While this is a major breakthrough, you certainly can't deny that Raduga himself is an ambitious individual. Just last year he was hospitalized for installing an implant into his own brain to control his dreams, so it looks like Elon Musk and Neuralink might have a competitor on the horizon.