Imagine Andrew Weiner's internet connections updated into continuous, brain linked multi-person consensual sensual reality.

Next, dream management will allow us to learn while we sleep - including new languages. Since dream sleep is necessary for learning and memory, why not put it to conscious use?

Third, lovemaking will technologically enhance, "allowing individuals to connect with their partner whilst away from home." Linking peripheral nervous systems through "active skin electronics" will not just improve lovemaking, but allow individuals to "experience each other's feeling and emotions." Actvie contact lenses will change the image delivered to our retinas, so "individuals will be able to adjust how their partner looks whilst making love."  This will enable people to change the image of their partner on a regular basis, and only they will be aware - their lover "will not be able to tell what they are looking at."

Picture it - morphing your hubby in a youthful, studmuffin version of Dick Cheney.

Some other manifestations of commercially available future rest include:

1. Augmented reality - Hotel walls and furniture will be used to display anything - paintings, fantasy games, or virtual family images for lonely travelers - including "a picture of their home bedroom." (For movie buffs, Fahrenheit 451 - the doomed Truffaut version with the terminally unhappy and discontent Oskar Werner - may come to mind.)

2. Atmospheric temperature controls, 3 D outdoor sounds, and fabrics broadcasting scents and colors will allow the simulation of any kind of environment (Star Trek and innumerable Sci-FI television series and films become our future.)

3. Travelers will enjoy theatre or local tourist attractions or wander through town remotely from the "comfort of their room...regardless of the actual time or weather." (Stanislav Lem's World Futurological Conference is one cautionary novel on this subject.)

Other projected future rest opportunities sound very close to what is already or nearly available - medical monitoring while asleep; shopping from the room, with the "walls replicating the interior of a shop" (which can be done presently off your smartphone.)  

Fantasy, Fiction, and Fact

Delmore Schwartz said that in dreams became realities. Many internet entrepreneurs knew very early on that porn represented an enormous "business opportunity." Huge resources are flowing into virtual reality "enhancements."  Much of this will be driven by games technology, which continue to make the experiences more lifelike year by year. As the pleasures of games become increasingly irresistible, their effects on the brains and bodies will also increase (see my "Overloaded" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-edlund-md/add-symptoms_b_65... ). There's little reason to doubt these rapidly moving technologies will change man-machine and human-human interaction greatly over the next few decades. Most won't require a hotel room - just any handy mobile computing unit.

How much will we enjoy the results?  Despite new forms of pleasure and experience, those who shout "I want to be a machine" should be careful what they wish for.

As for understanding brain chemistry and dynamics well enough to "hack" into dreams and consciously change their content, I remain skeptical (see my http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-edlund-md/dream-sharing-inc... ). Computing power is growing as quickly as Moore's Law says it should, but that and more will be needed to figure out the manifold information systems involved in the simplest human thought. Then again, when I was a kid I read about fabulous rocket cars that in 1985 that would zip 200 mph on the highway before going airborne to land in the parking lot of your favorite elevated shopping mall.

Brains are complicated. Some complex systems are truly complex - and as contradictory in their forms as quantum mechanics, now renovated as quantum information theory. Making the brain as well understood as a formulaic daytime soap operas may take a while.

The Asymptotic Curve

Some technologies change fast but others don't. Richard Nixon declared the war on cancer in 1969 so that we would "cure cancer" in a few decades. Instead, the death rates of most tumors have not appreciably decreased despite major progress in scientific understanding.

That's how things go - the asymptotic growth curve works that way. Many technologies show little progress, a virtual "flat line" until things really gear up - then move upward with geometric progression. Information technology has been like that over the last three decades - and hopefully will continue rapid advancement.  We can hope something similar will occur in biotechnology - particularly as varied technologies converge.

But in the meantime we're stuck with our old brains and our rapidly regenerating though aging bodies. Lucky for us, through predreaming, spiritual rest exercises, and the historic but biologically sophisticated effects of a hot bath, we can make present day sleeping a rather fantastic experience right now. And we don't have to worry about where we'll get all the energy resources to enjoy the hotel room of 2030.

Not yet.