Issue 3. From Mad Men to Sandmen. Advertising... in your dreams?

Hello there! Strap yourself in for a new year and an even newer newsletter that… reflects my mood.

I’m drowsy, restless; thoughts bopping about my head like a broken pinball machine, while my body sits in the comfy chair.

It’s taking me longer to set a decent pace this year. Normally I’m all-guns-blazing by January 4th, kicking off a dozen new projects and already looking forward to my next well-deserved holiday, but NO! 

Not in 2021. Not yet. 

Instead, I’m drifting dreamily from living room to kitchen to bathroom and back, barely managing to blow dry my hair for meetings, sporadically dragging myself out onto the cold streets for a run, and trying to stay motivated. I just bought a Peloton. Such is the limbo of lockdown. 

In the UK, we’ve been locking down for almost a year. I’ll remember it forever, most notably my extremely vivid lockdown dreams. My lockdown dreams have been something else. Have yours? I mean, I’ve always been creative in my sleep (more on that later) but, WOW. 

In my lockdown dreams, I’m not just naked… I’m in the midst of the apocalypse with four legs and a lion’s head; my dead grandparents are there and they’ve forced me into a Hunger Games-esque situation in which I must destroy every member of the Spice Girls before dashing to the station in a last ditch attempt to catch my train to Hogwarts, which I miss by one second. 

Apparently, such vividness has been commonplace in lockdown, and is due to a combination of having more sleep (thus more time to dream) and more stress. Our dreams process our waking days, and whilst I haven’t visited many places in the last, oh, I don’t know, six thousand hours, there’s been a hell of a lot to process. 

So, in honour of my naked apocalypses, this issue is all about dreams. The dreams we have, the dreams we’re given and the dreams that could come true. Dreams are one of the least understood yet most fascinating parts of being a human. Apparently dogs dream, too. They dream of us, of course, and how lovely we are. Dreams hold secrets. They hold potential. And here’s six impossible things about them. 

1. Dreamvertising could happen. But will it? 

Do cyborgs dream of electric dogs? Nah. More like Coca Cola, or Red Bull. Maybe rollerblading down a seaside pier on their period, if they’re lucky. 

I feel like I should state up front: I’m not a psychopath. Nor am I one of those Silicon Valley man-trepreneurs that craves power and a hot girlfriend. I don’t want to control how people vote, or make them racist, and I’ve never wanted to be a billionaire. 

However, I’m definitely up for scoping out the kind of innovation that’s just a little too uncomfortable to talk about freely. I’m in the ‘might we?’ category, not “$ we should, because we can $” camp. 

I’ve been talking about dreamvertising for a few years, yet no one’s taken me that seriously. Maybe it’s cos I’m a girl, dunno. But having (strategically and creatively) sold ad space to various different big brands over the years I’ve seen most of the places our waking eyes and ears land on eventually filled with ads. The posters on our journeys, the links in our search, the beginnings of our podcasts. Someone even turned out of office email replies into marketing real estate. People are now using the night sky to advertise onto, with drones, in a far more sophisticated way than Jeff proposing to Shirley in skywriting. 

So surely it makes sense that if the conscious is dominated by (according to the last count) 10,000 ads a day, then someone, somewhere, is going to be thinking about that final uncharted territory. The subconscious. Imagine if you had 100% share of voice in someone’s dreams? We spend a third of our lives sleeping, after all. 

A 2019 quant and qual study of Iranian consumers called ‘The role of dreams of ads in purchase intention’ (Mahdavi, M., Fatehi Rad, N., & Barbosa, B) found that purchase intention for a product and brand increases if someone dreams about it. They exposed participants to ads at an abnormally high frequency to test whether that would impact participants' dreams, and then if those dreams affected their likelihood to buy. The findings were positive in both instances. 

(I implore you to read the full report. It’s not long, and it’s wonderfully written. ) 

Of course one challenge with that (there’s many!) is that you’re letting the consumer’s brain run riot. You don’t know how your product might feature in their dream, and what kind of childhood Freudian angst might accompany it. What if we took this one step further and had greater control over the creative? Oooooooh, now it gets really interesting. 

There’s already technology on the market that facilitates lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when you hit that crazy little phase of REM sleep in which your eyes twitch and your thoughts get more intense and if you try really hard (you have to train yourself) you achieve enough subconscious awareness to craft or manipulate your own dreams. There’s so much content about it online, lucid dreaming is pretty much a subculture. 

Dutch neuroscientists Dr. Derk Mulder and Dr. André Keizer have created a tech product they call the Lucid Dreamer. How does it work? I’ll give you the non-technical version. Using a fancy little brain hat (EEG nodes) the machine can detect when you start dreaming, and how you’re dreaming. It then applies transcranial alternating current stimulation (or tACS) which cranks up the part of your brain that facilitates lucid dreaming; also applying light and sound stimulation for neural entrainment. 

So in short, it’s possible. In theory, if you accompanied the Lucid Dreamer with certain identifiable sounds (like the fizz of Coca-Cola bubbles), flashed branded Pantone lights and even used a voice or jingle, then you could provide a branded experience in someone’s sleep.

Imagine! Red Bull helps you fly! Axe makes you attractive to the opposite sex! Bodyform gives you rollerblades to delicately pound down a seaside pier! Brands could give great subconscious experiences. Because that’s what we’re all selling, right? Dreams? 

Fancy it? 

I know what you’re thinking: BURN HER! SHE’S A WITCH! 

But am I? (Maybe. To be fair... if this was five hundred years ago the authorities would definitely be throwing in me in the local lake.) But all the stuff we’ve been saying about consumers wanting personalisation and to connect with brands on a deeper level… Dreamvertising would achieve it!

And let’s not forget, some people have a terrible relationship with sleep, including nightmares, mental conditions like PTSD, and serial killers like Freddie Kruger. According to Elon what-the-fuck Musk we’re all gonna have to become cyborgs to stay relevant in the future anyway, so digitising our dreams is a perfectly logical step.

Hey, maybe even Pedigree Chum could do a version for dogs. 

2. Demon days, but especially nights

The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, and it’s an extremely accurate graphical representation of my own sleeping experiences. I suffer from sleep paralysis. I have done for decades and if you’ve never had it before (most people actually do at one stage or another) I assure you: it’s both frustrating and terrifying. 

Sleep Paralysis is the process of falling asleep or waking up and not being able to move or speak; sometimes for up to a few minutes. When this occurs, the brain kicks into panic mode and can cause the sufferer to hallucinate, believe they are choking or ‘sense’ a presence close to them of which they are afraid. There’s no way to cure it. 

The painting The Nightmare shows a woman asleep, with a demon crouched on her chest like an absolute dickhead. For many, this is how sleep paralysis feels. A sensation of being crushed, held down and suffocated.

It’s a universal thing, and many cultures boast myths to explain these episodes. Canadian Inuits reckon shamans cause them. According to ancient Japanese theory, it's the work of vengeful spirits. In Brazilian folklore, the demon is a woman! A demented lady called Pisadeira with long fingernails who lurks on rooftops in the night, then walks on the chest of people who sleep on their backs. I think it's all those things.

Rumour has it, sleep paralysis affects the busy of mind. And we all know that the busier the mind… the more creative the output! Perhaps the most tolerable thing about fear, and pain, is that you can turn it into art.

This brilliant article on The Overtake profiles artists who’ve turned their nightmares into haunting pieces, as a means of therapy and even cure, including ‘Still from Devil in the Room' by Carla MacKinnon (below), who discusses using her sleep paralysis in her work: “Instead of shying away from the experience, I really got to know it. This caused a respite in the condition. It frightened me less. I think I stopped getting it so often because I wasn’t as terrified.”

3. Don’t hate the game, hate the players. 

I was excited when the game Dreams was launched for PS4 (to rave reviews) at the beginning of last year. Described as a ‘game creation system’ (or engine) it enables players to build console games, and was made by the same brains behind Little Big Planet. 

The game has two modes, “Dream Shaping” where players use in-game tools to create their own games, art, music, animation etc and “Dream Surfing”, where players can access other people’s creations. According to a very positive writeup in the Independent, it “gives players unprecedented freedom to create.”  Woo hoo!

Dreams is typical of the well-documented Maker Movement which (without sounding too cheesy) has been a true social phenomenon, where making and creating are democratised to unbelievable affect. With laptops, cameras, consoles and mobile phones we’re able to produce quality content that slaps just as much as a studio production. Here’s a collage of some of Dream’s best; and a few of its finer stars are able to monetise their stuff, too. 

However! Dreams has encountered a slight pickle. It seems the creators are creating in their droves; hundreds of thousands of games have been made on the platform.

But players aren’t playing.

Games expert Jack Yarwood has a hypothesis: that people are far more reluctant to seek out and wade through new and original work from 'nobodies', instead preferring to lean towards popular, established characters. 

“People are far more likely to click on something featuring characters from Shrek, Fall Guys, or whatever else is popular in meme culture, than trying out something new by an unknown creator. This can be pretty demoralizing for other creators who spend weeks and months working on original projects.”

With this, we’re reminded that any successful ‘maker’ space can’t just rely on creators. You need an audience. Audiences give validation (we’re all human), but also feedback. This is why TikTok works so well: 45% of its audience don’t even make videos, they just watch. On TikTok, people want to see the random shit, especially since after a few seconds they’ll be able to move into the next. And in addition, TikTok personalises each user's experience to place the right new content in front of the right people, Dreams hasn't managed this yet. Turns out, that's essential.

According to futurist Jane McGonigal, one solution for such creator-overload could be to pay people to play games, thus empowering the big names and creators to make more. It’s radical, but it could work... (Don't watch this video now, watch it later!)

4. Chances are, you’re psychic. 

According to research, between15-30% of people have had precognitive dreams.

That’s right… up to a third of us can predict the future. In our dreams.

So says Dr Julia Mossbridge, who was dedicated the last 15 years to studying the phenomenon of ‘precognition'. 

She argues that dreams about the future are our nervous system preparing us for the imminent, and is certain that her own life was saved by a dream about a house fire... before her house promptly caught fire. The impending danger was so powerful, she says, that her body sensed it before it happened. 

The idea that predictions about the future can be physical is an interesting one, and Mossbridge has conducted various studies to suggest that some of us do feel things before they happen. Up to 30% of us. So, you know, maybe if I feel like I’m on holiday, in my bones, and try and feel it really hard, that might happen too?

And if I find out one of you dreamt about 2020 before it happened and didn't warn us, I'll be livid.

5. Even dreaming has a gender gap! 

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Men have long dreams, Women have short dreams…. The differences are endless! And yes, alongside salary and basic human rights, even dreaming has a gender gap. 

According to the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), an open-access digital archive and search engine, which includes data and insight on thousands upon thousands of dreams, women are more likely to be poor sleepers and active dreamers, while men tend to be better sleepers and minimal dreamers. In addition, women experience more fear and stress in their dreams, whilst men exhibit higher frequencies of dreaming about aggression and sex. 

Ah, maaaaaaan. Now we gotta protest against that, too?! According to Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D. - a psychologist of religion focusing on dreams in science, history, art, and politics - these differences are entirely expected. 

“The gender gap in dreaming does not reflect a permanent division in human nature. It does, however, give an honest portrait of the deep psychological differences in how men and women experience the contemporary world.” 

6. Dream first, edit later 

I’ve been a writer for many years and my relationship with editing is problematic to say the least. I’m a dreamer! I have little urge to correct or restrict myself, or to delete completely unnecessary paragraphs.

The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever been is just get your first draft DONE!

Dream big, go wild, let the furthest corners of your brain’s frontal lobe expunge that creative goodness, and then edit tomorrow, in a different frame of mind.

As a source of unique brilliance, our dreaming state-of-mind is utterly underrated. Some exceptional works of timeless genius were actually invented in dreams, such as: 

• Terminator, the movie 
• Frankenstein, the book 
• Google! 
• The Sewing Machine?! 
• Einstein’s theory of relativity?!?!?!!??! 

There’s a longer list, here. So dream first, edit later, and change the world!

NOW GO FORTH AND MAKE YOUR WILDEST DREAMS COME TRUE! 

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That's me, for issue 3. If you want to get in touch, message me on LinkedIn or via amycharlottekean.co.uk. I've worked out I enough time spare for one (just one!) new client over the next few months so if you have an itch, a hunch, or a dream, get in touch. I can help you understand you audience better, power more creative collaborations or invent brand new things that get you all the right attention.

“From the moment I fell down that rabbit hole I've been told where I must go and who I must be. I've been shrunk, stretched, scratched, and stuffed into a teapot. I've been accused of being Alice and of not being Alice but this is my dream. I'll decide where it goes from here.” Alice in Wonderland (2011)