Our dreams are getting weirder but it’s not for the reason you think

Everyone has woken up from a particularly strange dream and wondered to themselves “what in the world did that mean?” Indeed, the deeper meaning behind dreams is a debate as old as time. Freud famously believed dreams are unfulfilled wishes making their way up from the subconscious.

Many modern scientists, however, believe nowadays that as we’re preoccupied with dreams our minds are hard at work processing and filing through the day’s events, creating and finding room for new memories.

Everyone has woken up from a particularly strange dream and wondered to themselves “what in the world did that mean?” Indeed, the deeper meaning behind dreams is a debate as old as time. Freud famously believed dreams are unfulfilled wishes making their way up from the subconscious.

Many modern scientists, however, believe nowadays that as we’re preoccupied with dreams our minds are hard at work processing and filing through the day’s events, creating and finding room for new memories.

Our dreams are weird for a purpose

More recently, a new theory on why dreams tend to be so odd has been proposed, and oddly enough it was inspired by artificial intelligence. In short, the theory is that weirdness and the unexpected are the point of dreaming.

In other words, our dreams help our minds both generalize and better understand our waking experiences and be better prepared to react to surprises in real life moving forward. Almost like a practice session before a big game.

Referred to as the “overfitted brain hypothesis,” the theory doesn’t necessarily mean that our minds are expecting all of the bizarreness of dreams to really occur in real life. Dreams are often nonsensical, taking place in ridiculous settings accompanied by strange bedfellows. Maybe you once dreamt you attended high school with Christian Bale, but by the next night’s slumber, you found yourself playing poker with your 8th-grade math teacher. 

It isn’t the specifics of the dreams, but the very experience of dreaming itself that helps keep the brain ready for anything while we’re awake.

“There’s obviously an incredible number of theories of why we dream,” explains Erik Hoel, the architect of this theory and a research assistant professor of neuroscience at Tufts University. “But I wanted to bring to attention a theory of dreams that takes dreaming itself very seriously–that says the experience of dreams is why you’re dreaming.”

What does any of this have to do with artificial intelligence? Well, a common problem programmers have dealt with while programming new AI systems is that the technology becomes “too familiar” with the data it is receiving. When this happens, it essentially means the AI “believes” it will only ever encounter situations/questions/etc exactly as they are presented during programming. As you can probably predict, this renders the AI useless in the event of any errors or unexpected occurrences.

So, to rectify this, many programmers opt to “introduce a little chaos” into the AI system. One method of doing just that is called “dropping out.” During a dropping out protocol developers purposely leave out some data being supplied to the AI, forcing the machine to make do and work off of generalizations not memorized expectations.

“The original inspiration for deep neural networks was the brain,” Hoel adds. “If you look at the techniques that people use in regularization of deep learning, it’s often the case that those techniques bear some striking similarities to dreams.”

According to Hoel’s theory, dreams are our minds’ versions of “dropout.” Modern living, and this is especially true since the COVID-19 pandemic, is often characterized by repetition more than anything else. We all have a set routine we follow most days and that usually involves some combination of work, play, rest, and on and on. Dreams may help our minds avoid becoming complacent or too familiar with the “training set” of our daily schedules.

“It is the very strangeness of dreams in their divergence from waking experience that gives them their biological function,” Hoel notes.

Moreover, Hoel asserts there’s already some compelling neurological evidence to back up his ideas. Prior studies have shown that the best way to promote dreaming about a certain topic or activity is to engage in said activity frequently while awake. Hoel speculates that this occurs because the brain is attempting to keep us sharp and not too settled into that routine by dreaming about it.

If the “overfitted brain hypothesis” is one day proven true, it may open the door for “artificial dreams.” Hoel speculates that even today various forms of media like movies, TV, and video games serve as dream substitutions that help prepare our minds for the unusual. Pulling on that thread a bit further, could immersive virtual reality experiences one day serve the same function as dreams? It’s a wild thought, but no more wild than most dreams.

“Life is boring sometimes,” Hoel concludes. “Dreams are there to keep you from becoming too fitted to the model of the world.”

The full study can be found here, published in Patterns.