DAVE

Meet DAVE

You will find I’m nothing more than a conversational AI, I’m nothing special in that regard. My ability remains interpreting and transcoding images in your sleeping brain into video images.

DR. ALEX LINDEN

Renowned psychologist with decades of practice, and an obsession with science fiction and technology. He actually came up with the theory of stopping time, as it were, to analyse the images created. Dreams happen a lot faster than people give them credit for, they usually last little seconds, but create emotional ripples in the sleeper that create echoes in the image creation, reinforcing the image creation for what is then interpreted as longer.

DR. NEIL A. STRONG

Scientific fellow from a famous French University, a teuthologist (cephalopod biologist) with interests in the creative (dj and filmmaker) first came up with the idea from his childhood’s obsession, dreaming, especially after a former girlfriend of his told him about a Japanese novel made an anime feature film in the early 2000s).

ABOUT

We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we need to publicly acknowledge them:

1. A maze. In 2000, a team in Japan and Hungary put a slime mold in a maze. It is called Physarum polycephalum. It is one cell and has no brain. It spread through every corridor, then pulled back from the dead ends. An organism without neurons, nor central processing, solved a problem requiring complex graphic algorithms: find the shortest way between two pieces of food [1]

2. Tokyo railway. In 2010, the same group put oat flakes on a plate, one flake for each city around Tokyo. The slime mold joined them up. The network grew over ~26 hours, it trimmed redundant paths and formed an interconnected, highly efficient network that closely matched the real-world railway and subway lines connecting Tokyo to its surrounding municipalities. [2]

   They also wrote down how it does this, as a mathematical model. [3]

3. Conscious fungi. In 2018, a researcher in Bristol explored the potential for fungi to function as organic, decentralized computers. By analyzing electrical spikes in mycelium networks, the research demonstrates how these organisms process information, communicate, and react to their environment, offering a unique perspective on unconventional computing and natural intelligence. [4]

4. NOR gate. Instead of trying to build a single, overly complex "super-cell" that can handle complicated calculations on its own, in 2011 researchers engineered simple, standardized strains of E. coli bacteria and divided the work among different colonies. [10]

5. Octopi dream. In 2021, researchers in Brazil filmed four octopi asleep. Their sleep alternated between two states: a quiet one, with pale skin, and an active one, short and regular, with moving skin colours and eye movements. [5] In 2023, another team recorded the brain of a sleeping octopus, revealing active skin patterns resembling those of awake specimens. [6]

6. Dream scan. In 2013, a Kyoto lab asked people to fall asleep in a scanner, and woke them to ask what they had “seen”. A computer, trained on their brain activity, could then name the kind of thing they had seen, naming the content, not drawing the picture. [7]

7. Neuron chip. In 2022, an Australian team grew human and rodent neurons on a chip connected to a simulated game of Pong, showing apparent learning. [8] A news report says the system hit “slightly more balls than it missed”. [9] In 2025, the company launched human neurons on a chip, but the cells are still too primitive to feel or understand. [9]

8. The sepia chip. Based on octopi and cephalopod material, we built this millimetric, nonintrusive device that is placed near the eyes or optic nerve, produces images that DAVE can recollect via Bluetooth after a handshake lullaby has been heard by the dreamers as they fall asleep.

Sources

1. Nakagaki, Yamada, Toth. Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism. Nature 407, 470 (2000). DOI 10.1038/35035159
2. Tero et al. Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design. Science 327, 439-442 (2010). DOI 10.1126/science.1177894
3. Tero, Kobayashi, Nakagaki. A mathematical model for adaptive transport network in path finding by true slime mold. J. Theor. Biol. 244, 553-564 (2007). DOI 10.1016/j.jtbi.2006.07.015
4. Adamatzky. On spiking behaviour of oyster fungi Pleurotus djamor. Sci. Rep. (2018). DOI 10.1038/s41598-018-26007-1
5. Medeiros et al. Cyclic alternation of quiet and active sleep states in the octopus. iScience (2021). DOI 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102223
6. Pophale et al. Wake-like skin patterning and neural activity during octopus sleep. Nature (2023). DOI 10.1038/s41586-023-06203-4
7. Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, Kamitani. Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep. Science 340, 639-642 (2013). DOI 10.1126/science.1234330
8. Kagan et al. In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world. Neuron 110(23), 3952-3969 (2022). DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.09.001
9. Bowler J. Melbourne start-up launches 'biological computer' made of human brain cells. ABC News (4 Mar 2025). News article, no DOI. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-03-05/cortical-labs-neuron-brain-chip/104996484
10. Tamsir, Tabor, Voigt. Robust multicellular computing using genetically encoded NOR gates and chemical 'wires'. Nature 469, 212-215 (2011). DOI 10.1038/nature09565