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

TL;DR

Dreamento is an open-source Python toolbox enabling real-time and offline dream engineering with sleep EEG wearables, supporting data analysis, sensory stimulation, and sleep scoring for sleep and dreaming research.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, open-source platform for real-time and offline dream engineering using sleep EEG wearables, integrating multiple functionalities in a user-friendly GUI.

Findings

Supports real-time EEG data recording and visualization

Enables automatic sleep scoring and sensory stimulation

Facilitates post-processing and data integration with other modalities

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) real-time recording, monitoring, analysis, and sensory stimulation, and (2) offline post-processing of the resulting data, both in a graphical user interface (GUI). In real-time, Dreamento is capable of (1) data recording, visualization, 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). While Dreamento was primarily developed for (lucid) dreaming studies, its applications can be extended to other areas of sleep research such as closed-loop auditory stimulation and targeted memory reactivation.