Eldar's advert promised big things, a pair of magic glasses that could record your dreams while you sleep.
Presumably, you get up the next day, rewind the glasses and watch your sleep stories, but the implications worried me instantly. What if a pro-Kremlin Russian hacker got into my glasses and streamed my dreams on the Internet? But then I remembered a recent one had involved President Dmitry Medvedev in a compromising position — he was my butler — so at least that would backfire on them.
Eldar was a bit vague at first on how exactly the glasses captured the dreams. What kind of recording device does it use? Is there a camera that picks up images as our eyeballs flicker back and forth?
Eldar had, sadly, been slightly exaggerating.
"It has a light on it that goes on when you start to dream," he said. "That wakes you up, and you write down what your dream was about."
What if the light doesn't wake you up?
"It also makes a loud noise that wakes you up," he said.
And so you grab your pen and record the dream, old and new and clunky, technology in harmony.
The dream glasses come from the United States, he said, the invention of Stanislav Grof, which may or may not be the same Grof as the one, of that name, whose website says he is a leading expert in psychedelic psychotherapy. This included four years of working with LSD and mescaline in the 1950s.
The dream glasses are not mentioned on his site and, frankly, waking up a man with an LSD past with an annoying light and a loud noise hardly sounds advisable.
Eldar got into the business about seven years ago because of his sexually charged dreams. "I wanted to find out why these people were in my dreams," he said.
Apparently they were there because they wanted to help him.
The glasses, which seem designed to wake you up the moment you have fallen asleep after a night tossing and turning because of a lamp and foghorn attached to your head, cost 8,000 rubles ($270). They also provide a route to his real skill of dream interpretation.
A session, where he will explain what your dreams mean and also how to interpret your dreams in the future, costs 3,000 rubles.
I asked about a female friend in her 20s who had recently asked about a dream where a tooth fell out. He asked all the right questions. "Was there blood?" "How long ago did this happen?" before saying confidently "Your friend is a man in his 50s, isn't he?"
The dream, he added, means that in the future an event will happen to said toothless dreamer. Aging 30 years and a sex change seems unlikely though.
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