“A dream, like every element in the psychic structure, is a product of the total psyche. Hence we may expect to find in dreams everything that has ever been of significance in the life of humanity. Just as human life is not limited to this or that fundamental instinct, but builds itself up from a multiplicity of instincts, needs, desires, and physical and psychic conditions, etc., so the dream cannot be explained by this or that element in it, however beguilingly simple such an explanation may appear to be. We can be certain that it is incorrect, because no simple theory of instinct will ever be capable of grasping the human psyche, that mighty and mysterious thing, nor, consequently, its exponent, the dream. In order to do anything like justice to dreams, we need interpretive equipment that must be laboriously fitted together from all branches of the humane sciences.” *¹ C.G.Jung
A century after Carl Jung wrote his paper on the general aspects of dream psychology, Google released DeepDream, a software that produces visualizations of the deep learning process using convolutional neural networks, resulting in hallucinatory and dream-like images created by artificial intelligence.
The dream of the computer is based on its experience of the world, translated in the visual echo of its memories, and rearranged in a fantastic fashion that is not far from recalling the dreams of the oneironaut, or the psychedelic visions of the psychonaut.
Artificial brains hallucinates and dreams in the process of making sense of information, when every bit of memory is rearranged to create a complex significant underlying picture that will help decode meaning in patterns, and interpret reality.
In the second century AD, Artemidorus Daldianus, a greek diviner and master of oneiromancy, wrote the Oneirokritikon, a five-volume work discussing the nature of dreams, giving complex guidelines on how to interpret them, and presenting an encyclopedic catalogue of interpretations of dreams relating to the natural, human, and divine worlds.
In 2020, researchers at the Nokia Bell Lab in Cambridge released The DreamCatcher,
an a.i. software that interprets human dreams*², and presented this statement:
“We designed a Natural Language Processing tool that automatically scored 24.000 dream reports according to the Hall and Van de Castle’s scale. From each dream report, the tool extracted nouns to identify people, animals, and fictional characters, and verbs to classify interactions in terms of friendly interactions or acts of aggression. The results suggest that it is possible to build future technologies that bridge the current yawning gap between real life and dreaming,ultimately making our ‘sleeping mind’ quantifiable.”
And while scientists at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto are developing technologies able to video-record our dreams*³, I collect physical proofs of my past and rearrange them in hallucinatory representations of me, creating second skins as three-dimensional records of my neural processes.
rv, 2020
*¹ C.G.Jung, General Aspects of Dream Psychology (1916) in CW8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.527
*² A.Fogli, L.M.Aiello, D.Quercia, Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports (2020) in Royal Society Open Science, volume 7, issue 8
*³ T.Horikawa, M.Tamaki, Y.Miyawaki, Y.Kamitani, Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep (2013) in Science Vol. 340, Issue 6132, pp. 639-642