Mundane Monday: Dream Recorder

I Thought This Was Design Fiction (It’s Not)

I haven’t posted in a while. Been caught in the real world, which—turns out—is starting to feel more fictional than the futures I usually daydream about.

Normally I’d fire up the janky time machine and take you dumpster diving through the future—picking out curious objects that don’t exist yet. But today? Today I didn’t have to. The future came to me.

And it brought this:

👉 dreamrecorder.ai

The Dream Recorder¹.

Go on, say it out loud. Dream. Recorder.

I had to squint too. My first thought was “nahhh.” My second was “wait—wait.”
Because yes, it’s got the kind of vaporwave sci-fi name I would normally slap on an imaginary gadget from a speculative IKEA catalogue—but this one? It's real. And open source.

The page ends with a GitHub repo. Like, not a concept page. Not a Kickstarter tease. Just, here’s the code. Here’s the bill of materials. Here’s the 3D files. Print it. Build it. Dream into it.

💥 github.com/modem-works/dream-recorder

The part of me that builds things knows this is technically feasible. EEG headbands, latent diffusion models, semantic matching. Sure. Those ingredients have been floating around the lab for a bit.

Download the open-source code, gather the off-the-shelf hardware components, 3D print the shell, and assemble everything. No soldering required.

Excerpt from the Dream Recorder build guide.

But the part of me that imagines stuff like this? That part is short-circuiting.

Because if we already live in a world where you can download a dream recorder from GitHub, what’s left for design fiction to do?²

Maybe we don’t need to speculate anymore.
Maybe we just need to notice.

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1. Dream Recorder is an open-source venture by Modem. Developed in close collaboration with Mark Hinch (software & hardware), Ben Levinas and Joe Tsao (industrial design), and Alexis Jamet (illustrations).

2. I’m being provocative. Simmer down. There’s so much more left do do.