Artificial intelligence (AI) is now being used to find patterns in dream reports. This is wonderful news for science and less wonderful for anyone whose subconscious has ever sent them naked into a staff meeting.
The technology can’t peer directly into your sleeping brain and discover that you still resent your year eight maths teacher. Not yet, anyway. What the researchers are doing is using natural language processing to analyse written accounts of dreams and compare them with descriptions of waking life.
This requires a level of dedication most of us don’t possess. I usually wake from a dream remembering perhaps that there was a horse, or possibly an aunt, and that something terrible had happened near a chemist. By the time I’ve found my glasses, the lot has gone.
The Interpretation of Dreams
The researchers found that dreams draw on waking life. However, dreams don’t replay life. The sleeping brain takes familiar people and places, and moves them around. A workplace might become a hospital, or a childhood home acquires a railway platform. Your dentist could appear at your wedding, and while he says nothing, you know that he’s clearly disappointed in you.
Dreams also differ depending on the dreamer. People who might mind-wander reported more fragmented and changeable dreams. People who believed dreams were meaningful tended to describe richer dream worlds. Sleep quality mattered too. So did personality. Dreams are formed by what happens to us as well as the strange way each of us carries it around in our heads.
Large public events can follow us into bed as well. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, dreams became more emotionally intense and preoccupied with restriction. As people adjusted, those patterns eased. Even the subconscious grew tired of press conferences and the national struggle to acquire toilet paper.
AI allows researchers to examine these patterns on a scale that would be difficult for humans to do. People can identify themes in dream reports, but reading thousands of them would be subjective and exhausting. There are only so many accounts of forgotten exams and missing trousers one person can absorb.
Natural language processing can pick up emotional patterns and connections between waking concerns and dream content. This could give researchers a more consistent way to study memory and mental health.
All of this would be harmless enough if dreams remained safely private. Unfortunately, researchers have also begun communicating with lucid dreamers while they sleep.
Lucid Dreamers Drove Cars While asleep
Small muscle twitches sent instructions to a computer, making the vehicle move forwards or turn. Signals were sent back to warn the dreamers about obstacles. Some were better at it than others, which is also true of people who are awake, licensed, and entering a roundabout.
The study was tiny, and nobody yet knows what the practical uses might be. Skilled lucid dreamers are rare, and the findings do not mean ordinary sleepers can enrol in nocturnal driving lessons. This is probably for the best. Many of us cannot operate a fitted sheet while fully conscious.
Even so, the idea is remarkable. Someone who is asleep may be able to make decisions within a dream and communicate them to people in the waking world.
Once that boundary can be measured and crossed, sleep may stop being an acceptable excuse for inactivity.
This is often how progress occurs. First, scientists make a discovery about human consciousness. Next the HR manager asks whether the said discovery could be used to complete mandatory compliance training.
Workplace Dream Sessions in the Future
Then, all of a sudden, employees are being invited to overnight ideation sessions, hypothetically that is. Performance reviews could develop to include dream productivity, with reports such as “Hannah demonstrated high-level symbolic thinking, but continued to drive a virtual car into a subconscious hedge.”
There isn’t any suggestion that workplaces are planning this, yet. Dream researchers still want to understand how memory and consciousness work when we’re asleep, not how a company can squeeze eight more billable hours from the unconscious.
Yet history suggests that once a human activity can be measured, it will, at some stage, be given a dashboard. After which, it will acquire a password and a quarterly target.
For now, dreams are private and mostly forgotten by breakfast. Scientists are beginning to show us that they have patterns which AI can help to locate, and lucid dreamers might be able to send messages across the border of sleep and waking life.
But keep your dream journal somewhere safe. Otherwise, you might just wake up to find your subconscious has accepted a Teams invitation and volunteered you to take the minutes.
