The Parallels Between AI & Dreams
The Parallels Between AI & Dreams
The fascinating interconnectedness between dreaming & artificial Intelligence - intertwined with the mystery of consciousness.
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Within the realm of the subconscious lies a world of enigmatic wonders, where the mind wanders freely and imagination takes flight.
Dreams, like ethereal paintings on the canvas of our minds, have long fascinated humanity. But what if I told you that there are striking parallels between these nocturnal visions and the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
I am someone who genuinely enjoys learning — be it ancient or new knowledge.
I always have an ear to the earth, especially when it comes to ‘trends’ as they involve new technologies or advancements in design, humanity, and consciousness.
I have spent a lifetime (and well over a decade now, professionally) dedicating my focus to two things: Dreams and Awakening.
Both subject matters go hand-in-hand, but when stepping back and looking at them separately, it’s important to note that there are various perspectives from which we can view them.
For example, with dreams specifically, we can be speaking about daydreams, lucid dreams, waking dreams, or simply aspirations we hope to awaken to and live someday (goals, desires, etc.) in our waking life.
Today, I’d like to discuss an observation that I made at the beginning of this year and have been fine-tuning mentally and amongst fellow peers for the past few months.
The topic in question is: What do dreams and AI have in common?
When we think about AI, we may think about the ethics and potential issues on a greater scale that it may bring to our future and society at large. And while that is an important discussion, today I will simply be focusing on the parallels between these two realms and their common connection with the mystery of consciousness.
Due to my interests and field of study, I felt an innate draw when AI art really started to expand and exponentially advance over the last year.
This led me to various generative programs, where I played with learning and creating AI art (Midjourney currently being my go-to). Playing in this realm, I began to notice some odd, yet fascinating, parallels with my work in dreams.
What is wrong with all of the hands? And why are they so skewed?
For many, distorted hands were a telltale sign of AI art versus reality. An easy signal to our brain that this graphic, image, etc. was in fact not real, but AI-generated.
I say this in the past tense as many popular AI programs have now made major advancements in this specific area and hands are starting to look much better. You see this in the featured image of this article. Did you happen to notice the hands look great minus the fact that there is an extra finger and the hand orientation doesn’t make sense? Scroll up, and have a look.
Lost In Translation: Elusive Hands and Illegible Text
Have you ever noticed that your hands are always distorted somehow in your dreams?
You may look down at your hands in a dream and see that they are blurry, or maybe they don’t quite make sense.
Much like AI, obviously our dreams have the same problem with hands.
Similarly to hands being skewed, writing/text has also notably been known to be wonky in these two worlds.
Have you ever tried to read a book or check the time in a dream, only to find that the words or numbers are all awash, moving, or a blur?
Again, this phenomenon is not limited to dreams alone. AI systems also struggle with interpreting and understanding text.
When creating something via a platform such as MidJourney, when given any prompt that involves text reiteration or creations (such as a book cover or text logo), what AI creates may be visibly foreign - on some occasions appearing to be chicken-scratch, jumbled or not of this planet.
Like in dreams, the text you are seeing is merely a placeholder for perception, not actual words, and because of this, they play the role of ‘makeshift’ and are solely substitute ‘stand-ins’ to the actual text.
Your brain (through dreams), or the AI, is simply feeding a ‘fragmented memory’ or reproduction of what it believes, remembers, or thinks you see (or wish to see).
Because consciousness does not rely on the brain, but something more.. something deeper, this recollection (or in the case of AI, the simulated creation) is simply a memory of a memory - a fading and distant apparition of what once was, or could be.
This brings me to the ‘reality check’ aspect of both dreams & AI...
Reality Testing: The Ultimate Challenge
The Awakening Illusion
If you are unaware of what lucid dreaming is, to keep it simple it is becoming aware (aka lucid) that you are dreaming and ‘awakening’ in that dream.
In the lucid dreaming world, I teach clients to do a reality check throughout the day so that they are more able to activate lucidity while dreaming by simply observing their hands.
Through this practice, you are making a habit of remembering to check your hands and the details of them while you are awake. Then, when you go to sleep and are dreaming, if you can remember to check your hands you have the ability to allow your awareness to clue you into whether or not you are dreaming.
If your hands look normal - you are awake. And if they are abnormal - it is likely you are asleep & dreaming.
I say this with a caveat because I believe people can practice lucid dreaming and expand their awareness during the dream state, making the details of our hands clearer and more realistic. Perhaps this is similar to how AI has improved its ability to learn and see hands more clearly in its work via practice and an expansion of its capabilities.
Is this possible for text one day within dreams and AI? That’s a tough one. Only time (and practice) will tell.
Real or Fantasy?
Both dreams and AI have the uncanny ability to create a vivid and believable illusion of reality.
AI has the potential to simulate human experiences so convincingly that it becomes difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is artificial. It's like living in a perpetual state of "Is this real life or is this just fantasy?" (cue Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody), challenging our perception and inviting us to question the nature of existence.
In the realm of dreams, your brain constructs a world that feels just as tangible as the one you experience when you're awake. Our minds often accept the most bizarre scenarios as real. Reality and illusion intertwine, blurring the lines between what is real and what is imagined.
Both dreams and AI present us with the challenge of discerning truth from illusion.
Both realms possess the power to inspire, challenge our perception of reality, invite us to explore the depths of our imagination and push the boundaries of what is possible all the while testing the limits/boundaries of our human understanding.
Perhaps they even give us a deeper exploration of mind and consciousness.
In short, they both challenge our understanding of how the mind & our consciousness function.
Who knows what dreams may come, or what AI may dream up next!
So, the next time you drift off to sleep or marvel at the capabilities of AI, remember the surreal interconnectedness between these two extraordinary realms.
The journey continues, and the possibilities are endless.
Have you ever explored lucid dreaming or noticed whether you can see your hands in your dreams? Let us know your thoughts.
Dulce Ruby is an international speaker, lucidity researcher/developer, artist, and writer within the realms of awakening and dreams. She creates works and tools to awaken the masses into remembrance of who they truly are, exploring both inner & outer worlds. Explore her herbal brand Despierta, and Substack here.
So fitting to find this insightful inspiring construct on the Pulse last week,, been thinking about it ever since.
I feel that AI has been present in our illusory corporeal realm , time space continuum, from its inception . Seems as though the mind sees it manifest as an interloper . Our soul , being free from mortal constraints of time space continuum, is free from AI and its,,source…
Hi Dulce
It all seems interesting, when you place your conscious attention on your dreams or apparently also on AI. i have never looked into AI or used it, and to be honest i avoid it like the plague. There was a time about 8 months ago, when it seemed all of my calls to customer support, whether it was for Amazon, Telus, or my electric utility company -- were all, all of sudden, answered by AI. First i started reading from the Bible to it, the part about "the Beast" (even though i'm not religious) and it seemed there was some 'recognition' from the program that that was what i was doing -- me inferring AI was evil and that i would have nothing to do with it. But considering that Google, which maintains all the user profiles of everyone, and which would likely be providing mine to AI when it was engaged in being customer service to me, would have in my profile that i'm not religious, and then the AI program would deduce that i was rather trying to subvert the natural tendency people have, to treat AI as a sentient being. In subsequent instances of AI ansering my customer service calls, i just said "agent" and kept saying only "agent" till it put me on to a human responder (at least i believed it was human and did test them to see if i could get an appropriate emotional reaction to an unexpected scenario i posed regarding the problem i was calling about). But then, maybe only a week later, all the calls i made to customer service at any company, ceased to be AI mediated and now i never seem to encounter any anymore; they just go directly to a live agent.
i agree with you, Dulce, that "consciousness does not rely on the brain, but something more . . . something deeper." Not too many people, nowadays, believe consciousness isn't created and located in the brain. But what about "reality" though ? Most people would likely say reality is external to them and, contrary to what they say about consciousness, that it is NOT created by their brain. From the principles of quantum physics we do know that reality needs both a perceiver and the objects that are perceived, and that thus make up the reality. Where is the perceiver located then ? Even if we take that consciousness is not 'in' the brain, is the perceiver in the eye (which we know does connect with the brain) ? But then in regards to OOBEs we know that the point of perception can be outside the body, and that when the person is again in a normal state of consciousness, that they can remember what they perceived from the perspective of being outside their body, including seeing their own body lying in bed, lifeless. So considering this, can we say the brain or even the whole body, is even really necessary ? The physical body and the brain do have a purpose, however, and Rudolf Steiner said, very metaphorically, that "the brain is the ground that the soul walks on." He also identified 3 essential senses that constitute our higher nature -- thinking, feeling and willing.
It seems to me that the reason the hands have such a tendency to get distorted in dreams, is that our hands represent such a concentrated nexus of our conscious will in action -- one that we can directly perceive visually. In non-lucid dreaming we are letting our unconscious processes (which are mediated by our Body Elemental) run on their own (w/o our conscious will) and these processes access our recent memory (up to 3 days prior, in the waking state) and use it to create the reality we experience in non-lucid dreaming according to emotional issues we also have experienced at that time of the recent memories. However, in Lucid Dreaming we are using our own conscious will directly, which normally in the waking state, is hooked up to our hands, but something is different about it. What is different is that our Dreaming Body, which at first seems like our physical, waking body, actually operates under different rules in relation to our will -- ones which we need to comprehend and get used to, to be able to operate effectively in the Lucid Dreaming state, in order to engage the normal physical reality in real time (or some other reality we have access to, i.e. a shamanic reality). Learning to function effectively with the Dream Body was a major part of the Toltec teachings, as related by Carlos Castaneda and his and his mentor's apprentices.
The biggest problem is recouping the free, life energy (called Personal Power (or Kavanah by the Kabbalists)) we've invested in our waking lives and the situations, people and objects, we have unconsciously and emotionally connected this energy to. This giving away of our Personal Power, is related to the psychodynamic concept of "defending the Self" as in we waste almost all our life energy, all the time (which we need for building our Dream Body) in defending the Self -- a tenuous Self open to attack, that we have constructed through our difficult life experiences, especially in regards to trauma. (A good primer on this topic is the non-Toltec related book, The Undefended Self by Susan Thesenga.)
i see the issue of making our free, life energy available to us again (rather than perpetually tied down by an unconscious psyche) -- as being closely related to Carl Jung's concept of Individuation. In analyzing dreams or by using active (Alchemical) imagination in the waking state -- there is an imaginal process (sequence of symbolic images) representing the path to Individuation (one such Alchemical sequence is recoded in the Book of Lambspring by Nicholas Barnaud (1538–1604)). The images will be different for each person, culture and time period, but the symbolism behind the images should be constant, unless there is some major shift in human makeup.
i confess that i really know nothing about AI and the problems, i.e. accurately representing hands and text, of which you write. It is interesting that these issues seem to parallel the issues found when one begins Lucid Dreaming, but i wonder if AI (or its ‘handlers’/directors) isn't just deliberately having it parallel our dreaming processes ? Surely representing text accurately wouldn't logically be a problem for AI, which can represent human speech quite well now, as well as then transcribe it into text, and why should representing hands be such a problem for it, if the raw data it is fed, are many pictures (or videos) of people with their hands visible, just as it might be in regards to something similar, like representing a tree accurately ?
i have realized that all the dark themed movies and TV shows released lately, many with scenes of meaningless violence and evil, unworldly creatures -- do influence the astral state, which our astral body enters in sleep and unconsciously dreams in. This is the realm of the Collective Unconscious, of which Jung speaks, which is composed of the images (and their emotional qualities) across both the culture the dreamer is part of, and at a deeper level, those images dreamed by the whole of humanity at the current time.
But if AI is actually tapping into the astral plane itself, rather being instructed to artificially represent it, this would be something quite unprecedented. i am finding that my own sleeping patterns are quite disturbed lately, as i often wake up around 4am or even earlier, and not be able to get back to sleep again that night. My dreams seem distant and not easy to remember, as well. Arthur Firstenberg, who wrote, The Invisible Rainbow, about the energetic influence of electric/electronic technology on human health as well as on animal deaths, conducted a survey about the effects people experienced when the first array of SpaceX satellite were activated on 25 March, 2021 with one of the most common health effects noted, being insomnia https://cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Survey-Results.pdf That was with several thousand satellites being turned on. Now Firstenberg writes that it will soon be a million satellites putting out high frequency radiation across the globe https://cellphonetaskforce.org/one-million-satellites-planned/ What effect is this massive WiFi gridwork around the planet having on the astral state of sleepers ? Carl Jung famously said that "Dreams are the royal road to the Unconscious" as in analyzing a client's dreams in Jungian therapy is one of the best ways to understand their unconscious processes. Is it possible that AI is now somehow sensing and/or even controlling the dreaming state of all humanity, and that is why it is also mirroring the typical problems encountered with dreaming the hands and text ? And since our Unconscious, both Personal and Collective, is that which drives our psyche (until we attain Individuation), we are really sitting ducks for being remotely controlled and unconsciously programmed.