I have been playing a lot of a particular game the past few days and I just had a dream about it, and it got me thinking. It was clearly a dream about the game, but the details were all wrong. I’m having a hard time remembering the particulars but in addition to remixing the game elements, I think other ideas were introduced that had nothing to do with the game, but still had the same visual aesthetic as the game.
Which kind of reminds me of stable diffusion. I wonder if dreaming is just the processing of raw sense memories into concepts and relationships. It’s interesting to me that (according to a brief skim of the Wikipedia page on Dreams which I’m finding a delightful read) we only remember dreams that get interrupted, which seems to imply that it’s not important that we remember our dreams as long as the processing gets done. I find that strange considering how often people credit dreams with flashes of insight or sudden clarity on some topic. Maybe those creative breakthroughs would have occurred to us even if we didn’t remember the dream that inspired them. My experience is that the vast majority of my dreams are complete nonsense, devoid of interesting ideas. But some of my dreams have made their way into my “Unsorted D&D concepts”.
What do you think? How do you think about dreams? Do you think this is nonsense? I’m a lil baked. It’s the holidays y’all and they are not going well. I just want to chat.
I think I agree with you (if reinforcement learning is what it sounds like it is). I think dreams might be simulations, where we try things out to see how they feel. A lot gets ‘decided’ in us subconsciously, which is why I don’t think it’s necessary for dreams to be remembered for them to be useful to us. Dreaming is fascinating!
It is. Reading the activation-synthesis hypothesis at the moment, which sounds similar to what I described. It’s a fun deep dive and I love that the explanation is still basically ¯\(ツ)/¯ given how much thought has been spent on it.