Neuro Diversions

So there he was, Richard Dawson, in all of his ’70s glory — with a dark blazer and medallion over gray turtleneck — seated behind a large, ornate desk in a room lined with bookshelves. The camera pulled in on him as credits appeared on-screen announcing that I’d found my way to some kind of documentary series or infomercial on talk shows that he was hosting.

I came upon this sight while seeming to browse television channels in a dream.

Waking up, I got the sense that I hadn’t actually been flipping channels but rather watching the results of artificial intelligence tasked with creating such a program. It was still a dream, of course, no matter the rationale behind what was on that monitor in my unconscious; as I rapidly became conscious, though, I found myself intensely musing on similarities between dreams and imagery generated by omnivorous algorithm.

One fascinating thing about dreams to me is that they can draw on the entirety of what we’ve taken in, knowingly or subconsciously, to inform the plots and dress the virtual sets of the movies that play in our head as we sleep.

I dreamt once about my cats, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, adopted when they were just about fully grown at eight months old, delighting in what was basically a false memory of seeing them as tiny kittens. While I never knew them that young in reality, I’d been around cats in their infancy before, so all the data was there for my brain to extrapolate how they would have looked.

That oneiric calculus has been put to use countless times in ways that I’d love to be able to unlock at will.

I have become aware in dreams that I was dreaming, but almost invariably awoken before I could explore much in a lucid state. How useful it would be to harness the input absorbed over a lifetime to better practice another language; how wonderful and yet also limiting to immerse myself in new comic books from my childhood so far only fleetingly glimpsed, whipped up by remixing the art styles and characters and trade dress so familiar to me; how thrilling but perhaps ultimately hollow to have conversations with simulacra of loved ones lost, imbued with every last detail, remembered or forgotten, of which my onboard computer has taken note.

Down that alluring road probably lies madness, should we learn to conjure immersive scenarios so enthralling that addiction ensues, although if we’re inexorably headed there I’d rather vanish into recombinations of my own memories than endlessly chase the high of results on a screen.


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