Graham Platner, the obscure 19th-century inventor behind the oddly-named "Automatic Sleepwalker," is finally trending as historians uncover his bizarre machine at a Philadelphia auction.
1. The machine, a clunky brass-and-wood contraption with a single flickering candle, was designed to record a sleeping person's dreams directly onto a wax cylinder, a sort of proto-voicemail for the subconscious.
2. Platner believed sleepwalking was a "sacred trance," not a disorder, and his invention was meant to capture prophetic whispers; historical records show he only ever successfully recorded his own mumbling about "purple cheese."
3. The rediscovered device is sparking heated debate among historians: was Platner a misguided genius or a quirky con artist who sold dreams to wealthy hypochondriacs in the 1870s?
4. A single surviving cylinder from the "Dream Recorder" features a garbled, six-minute recording that some say sounds like a whale song, while others claim it's Platner snoring through a tin horn.
5. The auction, scheduled for next week, has already drawn bids from both the Smithsonian and a sleep-tech startup, who hope to reverse-engineer the "Psyche-Phonograph" for a modern meditation app.