What I’m going to term as “dream seeing,” since there is no term for this scientific study yet, should not be confused with reading dreams. Dream reading is just listening to a person explain what they remember from their dream and then interpreting them. However, what I’ll be covering, dream seeing, involves a third party being allowed to actual view the images that are going through a person’s brain as they dream. And if the dreamer forgets what they dreamt about, the person who was watching will have every dream by the dreamer stored on a computer; So that both the dreamer and observer can go through the images that appeared in the dream again.

This may sound like science fiction right now but ground breaking technology has created the potential for such machines. Scientists from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have released the new study in the Neuron journal.

The computers which can view the images are similar to MRI scan machines, except they use: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The coolest thing about the fMRI scans is that by observing multiple scans of different scales the researchers can actually translate that brain activity into the image that is being viewed by someone. So say someone is looking at the shape of a square, then the fMRI can create the image of square simply by examining the brain’s activity. The brain's activity is displayed in an fMRI scan by using voxels. A voxel, is like a pixel but in 3 dimensions instead of 2. As the study explains: "We reconstructed visual images by combining local image bases of multiple scales, whose contrasts were independently decoded from fMRI activity by automatically selecting relevant voxels and exploiting their correlated patterns."

The small patch images were also recreated without the use of prior images, the study explains: "Binary-contrast, 10 × 10-patch images (2100 possible states) were accurately reconstructed without any image prior on a single trial or volume basis by measuring brain activity only for several hundred random images." The images created by the fMRI have yet to be perfect. They look very closely to pictures taken by cheap low-resolution digital cameras but the results are accurate. That is, if someone is looking at a square you won’t see a triangle appear on the fMRI scan, what you get is what you saw.

The scientists have also concluded that such examinations could be applied to someone as they're sleeping to view any images that appear in a person's dream. Although the experiment hasn't been performed, the scientists don't seem to see many major problems in accomplishing such a task. Right now what waits to be worked on is refining the precision of the image produced by a person's thoughts. In doing so, a dream's images will be easier to understand.