Prophetic, a San Francisco-based neurotechnology startup, is developing what it calls the Halo: a headband designed to induce lucid dreams through dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation during naturally occurring dreams by utilizing emerging technologies such as transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) and generative transformer architectures, along with established technologies like electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
Prophetic is an American technology company developing a non-invasive ultrasound neuromodulation device. The company was incorporated in January 2023 and launched in June 2023. Co-founder and CEO Eric Wollberg founded Prophetic alongside chief technology officer Wesley Louis Berry III, who was previously creating augmented reality art.
How the Halo Works
The science hinges on a well-documented neurological quirk. When we have a naturally occurring dream, our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex decreases in activity. The dlPFC is responsible for higher-order functions like decision-making, self-awareness, and logical thinking. Unlike regular dreams, the dlPFC in the brain becomes more active during lucid dreaming, which is thought to contribute to the heightened self-awareness and reasoning abilities present in these dreams.
Transcranial Focused Ultrasound (tFUS) is an emerging non-invasive neuromodulation technology that utilizes ultrasonic waves that are focused to precisely target areas within the brain. tFUS can stimulate neuronal activity by modulating the membrane potential of neurons, making them more likely to fire action potentials. This effect can activate specific neural circuits in a targeted region.
The device is powered by an AI system called Morpheus-1. It is the world's first multi-modal generative ultrasonic transformer designed to induce and stabilize lucid dreams. Morpheus-1 is a 103 million parameter transformer model trained on 8 GPUs for 2 days. Unlike large language models or image generators, Morpheus-1 takes brain activity as the prompt and generates shaped sound waves that can react with that brain state as an output.
The device's design, led by Card79, the studio behind Neuralink's N1, balances comfort with accuracy, keeping sensors snug and stable through the night. And because it streams data to a companion smartphone app, every session refines the ML model further, tailoring stimulation to each brain's quirks.
The Research Behind It
To explore those links further, Prophetic has partnered with the Donders Institute, a research center at Radboud University in the Netherlands that is focused on neuroscience and cognition, to generate the largest dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) observations of lucid dreamers, according to the company.
The underlying technology has legitimate scientific grounding. In previous research, scientists have already established that lucid dreaming tends to be associated with frontal brain activity in the gamma frequency. They also found that electrical brain stimulation can be used to increase sleepers' brain activity in the gamma frequency, thereby increasing their chance of experiencing dreaming lucidity.
Over the past decade, transcranial focused ultrasound has emerged, enabling the human brain to be stimulated safely and non-invasively through the skull with millimeter-scale spatial resolution, including cortical as well as deep brain structures. This tool offers an exciting opportunity for breakthroughs in consciousness research.
Expert Skepticism
Not everyone is convinced. "The study that they've got on their technology roadmap demonstrates different patterns of activation in the prefrontal cortex associated with lucid dreaming and they're trying to modulate those circuits," Guy Leschziner, a professor of neurology and sleep medicine at Guy's Hospital, told Live Science. "A lot of the time, we don't fully understand what we're doing by using either deep brain stimulation or transcranial stimulation, and sometimes the effects of these technological interventions are not necessarily doing what we think they're doing."
Lucid dream researchers have noted further complications. "As of now, we do not yet have a method of how to induce lucid dreams reliably and consistently outside of sleep laboratory settings," wrote Tadas Stumbrys, the assistant director of research at the Alef Trust. And in those studies, the success rate hovered at around 50 percent, with induction possible only among those who regularly had lucid dreams.
"It's just not that simple," according to Antonio Zadra, a psychology professor at the University of Montreal who specializes in sleep and dreaming. With other lucid-dream-inducing technologies, sleepers have been able to enter the lucid dream state, but they can quickly forget they are dreaming or get overexcited and wake up.
Pricing and Availability
The Halo is currently under research and development and expected delivery dates have not been determined yet. Halos will cost around $1,500 to $2,000 each, Wollberg estimated. Consumers are able to reserve a product ahead of time with a refundable $100 down payment.
Prophetic has received institutional financing from investors including BoxGroup, O'Shaughnessy Ventures, Shrug VC, Embark Ventures, and more.
The company's pitch for lucid dreaming extends beyond recreation. The goal is to give people control over their dreams, so they can use that time productively. A CEO could practice for an upcoming board meeting, an athlete could run through plays, a web designer could create new templates. There is real research suggesting such practice carries over into waking life. For instance, one study carried out by neuroscientists at the University of Bern, Switzerland showed that participants who practised flipping coins into a cup in their lucid dreams showed superior performance the next day compared with control participants.
Whether Prophetic can deliver on its vision remains uncertain. The intersection of AI and neuroscience is producing increasingly ambitious claims, and focused ultrasound represents a genuine advance in non-invasive brain stimulation. There's also been little research into the long-term effects of regular lucid dreaming, let alone the impacts of regularly inducing the dream state using brain modulation.
