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 dreams have multiple, non-mutually-exclusive functions: a protection mechanism against sleep disturbances, mixing old experiences into new situations, processing content you’ve seen through the day, so goes on. What you’re saying would be part of the later, for example.
Yeah I think so too. It’s a particular kind of thinking and processing and it probably helps with a lot of different things. The dream about one’s teeth falling out, for example: Watching someone try to live without teeth, especially without access to easy foods, is probably pretty distressing. A dream where the same fate befalls you allows you to feel what your feelings would be if you lost you’re teeth. At least for me, whenever I have that dream I always check on my teeth, if only with my tongue, to make sure they’re actually there and firmly in place. I bet that dream has been helping humans take care of their teeth for longer than we’ve had words.