Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/16/new-theory-of-why-our-dreams-are-so-weird.html
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Speak for yourself. My dreams last night about life as interior decor were refreshingly mundane.
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I think weird dreams are due to a feedback loop. There is a lot of random thought and especially visual imagery, and our brain tries to make sense of it. Like a rorchach blob, we turn it into something. Then maybe later there’s another blob and something has to be done with that one, too, to make sense of it.
If you wrote a story this way it would be maddening, having to incorporate the latest random element into some sort of coherent plot, and you’d probably end up with something akin to a dream plotline.
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“As we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere…in this way, every man is two men”
Truth is we are ALL dreaming right now. And when we fall “asleep” we are waking up in a different part of the multiverse.
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Whenever a new technology emerges (photography, holography, integrated circuits) we naturally theorize that our brains work the same way. There’s nothing wrong with that, a theory is a theory, after all. And the hypothesis might even continue to be true after the technology goes out of vogue.
Personally I think dreams are like a Mr. Fusion.
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Interesting idea.
Watching my daughter fall seamlessly into imaginative play and riff effortlessly about sometimes semi sensical scenarios makes me think Play is another way we learn in waking life. The dreaming is like a process of divergent and convergent thinking that helps solidify knowledge in a zip file that combines bits of data in a compressed freakshow format that we can’t decipher after we’ve reworked its narrative structure to make sense out of all the chaos.
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Not an entirely new theory. I recall about 10 years ago reading that dreams may be ‘garbage collection’ of the association nets: Fire random neuron sets, and whatever comes up, prune it.
In other words, a dream you don’t remember is something you’re less likely to remember.
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Or at least the way we think that technology works 
Neural nets have been created from a rather simplistic model of biological processes, so things that can be observed in neural nets might bear little or no resemblance to what happens in actual brains.
Maybe the visual imagery is also just another artefact of randomness?
Anyway, it’s a much simpler explanation than the “overfitted brain hypothesis”.
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Look, I just want someone to conclusively tell me whether I’m a butterfly or a person. Is that too much to ask?
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Last night I dreamt that you were dreaming that you were a butterfly dreaming you were a person dreaming you were a butterfly, if that helps.
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I thought this was an interesting idea. I can’t imagine how you’d possibly test it. That said, having thought about it for an hour it doesn’t seem likely to me. It’s possible that sleep has this effect of avoiding overfitting in our sensory processes (which, I think, are a little bit like simple AIs that sort things) but the speculation is about what effect it has on our conscious thoughts.
I don’t think we really know how conscious thought works, or even why we have it at all. I really don’t think conscious thought works like a sensory process or is modelled by current AIs.
And then there’s this:
So that loses me completely. If we are going to make an analogy between AIs and conscious thought through overfitting it should be obvious that a lot of fiction is pro- rather than anti-overfit. Aesop’s fables literally tell you how you are supposed to think at the end of them. Communications is how we pass on information and thoughts we already have to others not how we introduce random corruption into other people’s brains.
I know this is a little “ad hominem” but if a person thinks that fiction is akin to random jostling of neurons then I don’t think they’ve actually thought deeply at all about what learning is; how thinking things use communication to extend thought beyond biological media and create culture; or how culture feeds back into biological thought.
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You’re a butterperson? A Personfly?
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A pretty fly person? 
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For a white (person) guy? (or maybe not… I don’t know @Surprise_Puma’s race and gender identity…)
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There really should be a rimshot emoji. 
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We’ll need to make do with a pinkie pie gif. And my terrible spellingbrain.
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Agreed. To loosely paraphrase Stuart Best, alls I know is that Pumas a pretty fly.
(How are there not more Murphy Brown memes of Wallace Shawn on teh googles? My mission is clear.)
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Talk about weird…
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