Things that were true in a hypnagogic dream world I experienced last night (for like five seconds, while drifting in and out of sleep): 

• “Ghosts we” was a popular slang phrase, meaning something like “I approve of ghosting” or “I ghost people,” used as sort of a macho/”alpha” boast (like, “lots of women are interested in me, I don’t owe anything to any of them”)

• Grammatically speaking, I don’t know whether it was supposed to be interpreted as “we [are] ghosts” or what, but that’s what it meant
  

• Violent J of Insane Clown Posse had recently changed his stage name to “Go Sui,” which was universally interpreted as a made-up “Asian” name that sounded like “ghosts we”

I remember only the final minutes of last night’s dream: I was in a car, around lunchtime, with two friends (dream characters), and the friend driving the car casually revealed their plan to drive out to the beach, hunt a whale, bring its carcass (or part of it?) back home, and cook whale meat for lunch.  (Specifically for lunch, even though it was nearly lunchtime – they seemed to think, not just that this could all be done, but that it could all be done very quickly.)  They showed us a crude harpoon they’d made (not sure exactly how it was lodged into the car).

Last night I had the most horrifying dream I can remember in a long time.  (Won’t recount the content here, since it was very disturbing, and not very interesting apart from that.)

I’ve become more resentful of my dreams lately.  When I was younger, I used to think of the dream world as a space of open possibility, where I could explore ideas and aspects of my psyche too wild or too deeply buried to be available to my waking consciousness.  But the older I get, the less my dreams seem like deep, creative art and the more they seem like tropey, superficial art.

Considered as stories, they’re almost all thrillers, horror stories, or some mixture of the two genres.  They’re plot-driven, almost entirely free of characterization, with no “room to breathe,” no free exploration.  Everything is always focused on some big Problem I am confronting, what a writer would think of as the plot hook.  How can I avert the impending disaster?  How can I complete my task in the face of an implausibly extensive series of obstacles?  What, if anything, should I do in a scary situation I don’t understand?  How can I live with myself, knowing I’ve committed some great sin?

I think my dreams have grown more unpleasant in the last five years or so, and I’ve usually attributed any resentment I feel to this trend.  But I recorded some of my dreams in high school, and looking back at that text file, I notice that although the emotional tone was less aggressively negative back then, the plot devices and structures were the same.  I was trying to do something (often, transport myself to some particular place) and was repeatedly thwarted; I was placed in a baffling situation and mocked for not understanding it; there was always a Problem, and everything else was secondary to it.  Dream logic was an enemy, as it is now, making it impossible to know how to behave appropriately, morally, or effectively.  (In one dream from high school, I was horrified when I accidentally killed a friend’s bird while pet-sitting, then horrified in a different way when, inexplicably, the friend didn’t seem to care.)

I would resent my dreams less if I were more convinced that they were scaring me every night for a good cause.  But from what I have read of the science, dreams seem oddly disposable at best and actively harmful at worst.  Depression is associated with spending more time in REM sleep, and acute sleep deprivation has an antidepressant effect which can be traced specifically to the resulting REM deprivation.  Most antidepressants decrease REM, and MAOIs obliterate it almost completely – which would seem to rule out any theory of REM that makes it vital to human life, since people on MAOIs manage to do just fine (or as fine as they can given that they needed a MAOI to begin with), and never, like, spontaneously combust from a lack of dream-supplied spiritual sustenance or something.

Warning: here is where this post veers off into speculative bullshit, and speculative bullshit that probably over-weights my own dream experiences over others’.

My current pet theory of the function of REM is that it is doing the same thing as experience replay in DeepMind’s reinforcement learning algorithms.  (I make no claim that this is unique to me; I think a lot of people have independently had this idea.)  In experience replay, instead of learning immediately from each experience as it happens, an AI will build up a buffer of past experiences, and at some regular interval will learn from a random selection of those experiences, presented in no particular order.  This is meant to deal with the problem that successive experiences tend to be correlated, which can cause the AI’s parameters to spiral out of control unless the experiences are shuffled (“decorrelated”) first.

“REM sleep is experience replay” fits with a number of notable features of dreaming.  It fits with the way that dreams often use environments and situations from one’s past, but with different time periods jumbled together.  It fits with the tendency toward difficult and confusing situations, particularly those that are frustratingly unpredictable.  (Generally the AIs I’m talking about are either trying to predict what will happen, or just what “reward”/”punishment” value it will have for them, and it is popular to use an “attention” mechanism that preferentially replays frames on which the AI’s predictions were unusually bad.)

It fits with what I’ve heard about REM and memory.  REM seems to be important for certain kinds of memory, which sound like the kinds of memories tied to performance in difficult situations.  From Wikipedia (my emphasis):

REM sleep may favor the preservation of certain types of memories: specifically, procedural memory, spatial memory, and emotional memory. In rats, REM sleep increases following intensive learning, especially several hours after, and sometimes for multiple nights. Experimental REM sleep deprivation has sometimes inhibited memory consolidation, especially regarding complex processes (e.g., how to escape from an elaborate maze).^[92]In humans, the best evidence for REM’s improvement of memory pertains to learning of procedures—new ways of moving the body (such as trampoline jumping), and new techniques of problem solving. REM deprivation seemed to impair declarative (i.e., factual) memory only in more complex cases, such as memories of longer stories.^[93]

“New ways of moving the body” sounds like a case where being able to do simulated replays of your own failures would help.  Less so with declarative memory, where (outside of certain school tests) there is rarely a specific past experience you can replay for practice.  (If you try to learn to juggle, you will accumulate many memories of failing to execute a particular maneuver, but for most of the facts you know, you do not have any memories of failing to remember that specific fact.)

This interpretation puts my own dream frustrations in a disheartening light.  If I were a more ordinary mammal or bird, I would benefit from simulating past challenges.  In my dreams, I would replay memories of (say) chasing prey or being chased by predators, especially those where I made inaccurate predictions; I would learn to do better at these tasks, to beat my own high score.  But in my life as a modern human, most of the challenging and unpredictable situations I face are caused by complex social systems I cannot control or predict (even in principle), or complex interpersonal dramas where the least harmful course of action may be to do nothing at all.  Yet my brain subjects itself to endless remixes of these situations, in a Sisyphean search for a better high score, for a solution that does not exist.

I’ve posted here a number of times about the recurring dream plot where I re-enroll in high school or college of my own volition, and can’t explain why I did this, and it’s embarrassing and feels reflective of some psychological regression or failure to launch.  I’ve even posted before about how this is such a staple plot feature that it’s sometimes just there, in the background, while the dream focuses on other things.

Last night there was a new variant.  If it’s a dream where I’ve re-enrolled in college, one of two things happens: either I start over again as a new freshman, or I just have another senior year because of all my old credits.  (I think the logic there is that I already have all the qualifications for graduation – since I, in fact, graduated – so when I re-enroll, I’m automatically eligible to graduate at the end of the year, no matter what I do.)  In the senior version, I typically just try to graduate as a physics major again (getting a pointless second physics Bachelor’s), and have to write another senior thesis (several dreams have involved my 2nd thesis going badly).

But this time, I managed to re-enroll as a senior and get my second degree in … chemistry.  Despite never having taken a single chemistry class in college.  I had done this through some sort of “trick,” like writing a physical chemistry thesis that was mostly just physics, and in the dream I did feel a bit guilty about it.  But rather than being an embarrassing waste of time like usual, this felt kind of badass – like, how bad could I really feel about getting a degree in a totally new subject in just a year?

It was like the being that writes my dreams made a mistake – this was clearly supposed to be a backstory to an anxiety dream, perhaps concocted to provide a narrative explanation for some pre-existing anxious emotion, and yet the explanation didn’t work because I was just like “oh, I did that?  Cool.”  (I don’t remember the rest of the dream story at all, but there’s a faint halo of bad vibes surrounding the hole where a memory would be, so I’m pretty sure the dream-author just came up with something else.)

Had a bad dream last night that was a long series of false awakenings.  I would “wake up,” some weird/bad stuff would happen, I would realize I was dreaming, and then shortly thereafter I would “wake up” into another version of the dream.  Eventually I wised up to the point that I would instantly gain lucidity whenever anything strange would happen, but that just made the cycle go faster.

I think this has happened to me before?  It feels familiar.  Anyway, it’s a cleverly horrifying concept, so good job brain

Another funny thing about dreams: transportation seems to play an outsize role?  Or, it does in my dreams, anyway, and I’ve gotten the impressive that it is pervasive if not universal, the way the “naked in class” dream is pervasive.

Lots of dreams about getting places on buses and trains – complicated transfers, unexpectedly ending up five counties over, maze-like stations.  Some people have similar dreams about airports (and I’ve had a few, but it’s mostly buses and trains for me).

Freshly minted bullshit just-so story: dreams play a role in consolidating memories, and memories that are very emotionally salient or stressful tend to get consolidated extra hard.  Transportation-related experiences are the closest that many people get (on a regular basis) to the “fight or flight” scenarios regularly experienced by many other organisms (time is critical, you’re doing a lot of frantic spatial navigation).  So our brains try extra hard to consolidate these memories, like they would with memories of predators and stuff

If that’s true then we would also remember transportation experiences extra well, which sounds pretty weird but is, at least, a testable prediction

I had a dream last night that I was at a party and Jeff Bezos was there.  He had become disconnected from reality, like a mad king.   Amazon had released some sort of word processor / text editor, which was entirely tailored to Bezos’ apparently very strange preferences in such things, and which almost everyone else considered unusable.  At the party, he simply ranted on and on in defense of this program.  I ended up talking to him for several hours out of some weird kind of sympathy, since everyone else there quickly got tired of him and started avoiding him.

Since I seem to be relatively in-touch with dream memories at the moment, here are a few bits I want to note down:

For some reason, several recent dreams have riffed on the weird stoner house I lived in all the way back in 2010-11.  Similar “vibe” to the reenroll-in-college dreams.  I move into some maze-like, dusty, dimly lit catacomb in Portland.  In one it was claustrophobic and cave-like with several below-ground floors and carpets covering not only the floor but the walls; in another, it’s vast with big decrepit rooms, high ceilings, ridden with cobwebs, no basement but just one floor that seemed to go on forever.

A dream clearly from the same template as the “Michel Foucault’s sex museum” one: in both, a (real-world) transgressive figure – in this case, Angela Carter (inspired specifically by “Infernal Desire Machines”) – had designed a building as a curated “artistic experience,” with a succession of floors beneath the ground level.  You could choose how low to descend, and each level of physical descent corresponded to a step into stranger and more transgressive things.  I don’t think I went below the ground floor of Foucault’s museum, but with Carter’s structure (a bare concrete tunnel that wound around in a descending spiral) I actually had to go to the bottom to retrieve something that had been left there (it was a very practical thing, getting a laptop a friend had forgotten or something).  I wasn’t too bothered by this, since I honestly enjoyed the experience of walking along this tunnel encountering creepy otherworldly people (actors?) who would whisper cryptic psychosexual things to me and the like.

Frantic distraught rushing around in some sort of crisis/disaster (?) situation, inside a building that was a … complex of mens’ bathrooms?  There were halls, but every room they connected was a bathroom.  Some were pretty large, felt like locker rooms.  I was somehow an outsider there, I had something gravely important to do, and I was running and pushing my way through droves of guys who seemed also to be distraught and intent, but not for the same reason.  It wasn’t that everyone needed to use the bathrooms, which in fact went mostly unused, but whatever was happening there was in some way connected to them.  The bathrooms were filthy, all kinds of bodily fluids and waste everywhere.  (I suspect this dream was the result of my bladder being really full during the night :P)

Moving in to something resembling a university dorm.  This wasn’t one of the “shameful return to college” dreams – it wasn’t clear where I was, but there was a good reason to be there.  The dorms were laid out in a branching structure, where you’d pass through a door from the hall into a big antechamber with a huge number of side-doors, and one of those would lead to your actual room, which was big but full of beds, with six or eight people to a room.  The rooms were single-gender but the whole dorm was mixed, and I remember this mad rush trying to find my room among the many branches in a throng of many people, confusing a female room for my own, trying to push my way through a bunch of girls who seemed mildly creeped out.  There was an exaggerated gender differentiation in the dorm population – all the guys seemed like stereotypical frat boys, all the girls seemed like stereotypical sorority girls.  My room specifically was (except for me) composed of these really good-looking, socially sharp “finance bros,” who’d all worked on Wall Street before.  After fumbling around for conversation topics with the guy in the bed next to me, I hit upon some quality of myself that impressed him (math background could be lucrative?), and after that I hoped he’d become something like a friend, and help guide me through all the confusion.  Everything was glistening and expensive-looking, as exemplified by the new MacBooks the school had given everyone, their logos glowing in the dorm room at night.

A big party at my old college, and people are driving to and from somewhere else.  Everyone exuded party cheer but there was an atmosphere, for me, of both wariness and dissolution.  The car which was going to take me, among others, somewhere else, pulled up to the curb and I got in and rode for a bit and then time skipped back and the same sequence of events happened again, and again.  I could still choose my own actions, and I tried to explain what was happening, but it was hard and everyone kept ushering me along to the car with their drunken smiles.  Finally, on one loop, I brought this up in the car itself, and the guy in the other passenger seat seemed curious and started asking me questions about it.  I hoped he could help.

Looking at the above, strange buildings seem to be a running thread.  If you expand the category to “strange experiences navigating space,” it’s all over my dreams – many dreams about trains that don’t go where I expect, to distant wilderness or to neighboring counties I’d never heard of, and train stations and airports that contain multitudes.