light questions
Most-common questions we get about red and near-infrared light at dreamlab. Honest answers.
Two bands of light you can mostly not see. Red sits just past what your eye reads; near-infrared sits further past it, into the invisible. The red is the part you notice as a warm glow on skin. The near-infrared is the part that goes in, centimetres deep, to where your cells are.
At dreamlab you stand in front of a panel, one part of the body at a time, and Mantra talks you through each position.
At the levels we run, the usual effect is warmth, and the main thing to avoid is looking straight into the panel. Unlike pressure, there is no chamber, no equalising, and nothing to hold your breath for. You can stop at any point.
There are still people for whom light is not the first thing: recent photosensitising medication, some skin conditions, and pregnancy are the ones we ask about in the consultation. The full list and what we screen for is on the wellness page.
Warm, mostly. Some people feel nothing at all. You are standing, dressed as you like for the part being treated, and the session is quiet enough to think in. The panel is bright, so we give you something to look away into.
A session is short, and a program is a set number of them. The typical course page has the shape of it. As with anything here, nothing starts on its own and you can stop whenever you like.
It does not hurt. The most common report is warmth and, occasionally, a mild flush on the skin that fades. Because the light does not reach the depths that pressure does, the serious effects discussed in the light literature are about other devices, other intensities and other delivery routes.
Yes, and we are specific about it. We work in the deep-penetrating near-infrared band (around 810–850 nm), the window where light gets past skin and water into tissue rather than stopping at the surface.
Our class rule is the same one we use when we cite studies: research done at a different wavelength, a very different intensity, or a different delivery route is a different class, and we do not cite it as if it were ours. If a claim only holds for a device like that, we say so.
Honest answer: we know the mechanism better than we know the outcomes. Near-infrared light is absorbed by cytochrome c oxidase in your mitochondria, the last step of the chain that makes your cells' energy, and the work in the literature is largely about what that does at the cell level.
What that means for how you feel is still being measured, including by us. We will not make you a promise about what it does for a condition, and we will not put a number on it that we cannot show you the source for. The science pages say what is established, what is plausible and what is not known.
You can, and it is not the same thing. Home devices vary enormously in wavelength, irradiance and how much of the body they cover, and many are in a different class from what we run. What we add is the measured dose, the body-position protocol, and someone tracking what happens over months rather than a guess on a Wednesday.
No. We do not diagnose or prescribe, and we do not replace the person who does. Always talk to your doctor about anything serious, especially before adding light to whatever they have you on. The wellness page carries the fuller disclaimer.
Membership is a small yearly fee and sessions are part of the membership, so there is no insurance billing to chase. If your insurer covers light therapy elsewhere, that is a conversation for them and your doctor; ours does not depend on it.
You shouldn't, on our word alone. We tell you what the evidence supports, what is plausible, and what we do not know, and the science pages cite real work and say when findings come from a different device class than ours. Where we have not measured something, we say that too.
dreamlab is built with AI, and we are transparent about that. It is small: one person, one AI partner, refined with every session.
Comfortable clothes you can move a sleeve or a trouser leg for, and nothing on the skin over the area being treated that you would not want warmed. We will tell you what to expect before the first session on the what to expect page.