Dreaming with AI

Abstract

Our goal is to highlight the capabilities of modern, generative AI systems using the widely used and accessible ChatGPT text completion models from OpenAI, focusing on how they can be used for the analysis of dreams and dream journals. We start with a brief overview of the nature of dreams, methods of dream interpretation, and the importance of the human-dream relationship. We explore the ways that technology, specifically AI, fits into this space and examine the ways in which AI can be used to help us understand our dreams. We progress from simple dream interpretations, to interpretations according to different schools of thought, to interpreting symbols within individual dreams, and finally to analyzing patterns in individual dream journals. We conclude with a discussion of the ethical concerns surrounding AI and dreams, providing insights from past technological revolutions and how they have both helped and hindered the human endeavor. We finally outline what we believe to be a practical, realistic, and hopeful vision of how we see this field progressing based on the experiments and methodologies that were explored in this paper.