Future Models of AI-Enhanced Dream Interpretation

Source: Kelly Bulkeley

The interpretation of dreams is being revolutionized by the emergence of new technologies of artificial intelligence (AI). The advent of AI is rapidly expanding the accessibility of dream research, enabling a wider range of people to participate in and benefit from its methods and findings.

For instance, Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung encouraged dream interpreters to study the symbolism of folklore, mythology, and religions; AI can provide more access to these kinds of historical and cross-cultural resources. When Calvin Hall and G. William Domhoff call attention to the meaningful patterns in large collections of dreams, AI can provide more access to complex statistical analyses of precisely these kinds of patterns. When Jeremy Taylor and Montague Ullman highlight the value of bringing dream awareness to the broader public, AI can help their teachings reach vastly larger audiences all around the world.

Living as we do in a time of rapid technological change, no one can make confident claims about how exactly the future will develop. With that caution in mind, I foresee three possible roles of AI in the practice of dream interpretation.

1. Human alone

This is the “classic” model: sharing dreams with another person, co-creating an interpersonal space for honest dialogue, and trusting in the knowledge and intuition of the interpreter. No special technologies are required, just an open mind and a caring heart. We have been interpreting dreams in this way for thousands of years, if not longer, and there will always be a necessary and valuable place for such practices. Indeed, the rising prevalence of AI in everyday life may produce a premium for authentic interpersonal interactions, especially in areas of personal sensitivity, thus adding extra value to the services of human dream interpreters.

2. AI alone

AI-generated dream interpretations are a remarkable achievement of recent times and one I did not believe would happen as fast as it has. Publicly available AI systems, if properly prompted, can generate coherent dream interpretations with thought-provoking relevance to the dreamer’s waking life. Even if the insights seem rather mild, they can still have the beneficial effect of stimulating the dreamer to consider new possibilities and perspectives, which is often all that a human interpreter is able to do, too.

The huge advantage of the AI-alone model is its radical expansion of access to a powerful tool for exploring and understanding dreams. What will happen when anyone with a computer has access to a quick, easy, and accurate way to interpret their dreams? How much visionary power and creative energy will be unleashed?

3. Human-AI hybrid

The most powerful model going forward will be a human-AI hybrid approach to dream interpretation. Here, the AI helps to generate possible meanings, and the human interpreter evaluates these possibilities and decides which ones are most relevant to the dream at hand. For the dreamer, this is the best of both worlds—the vast informational resources of the AI plus the interpersonal sensitivities of the human interpreter. Several researchers are already experimenting with human-AI hybrids, and we can expect even more progress on this front in the near future.

These experiments may be more successful if the hybrid models take an additional factor into account. This is the quality of the AI system. The AI tools currently available to the public can already do amazing things. But a system trained on massive collections of random and perhaps ethically suspicious data “scraped” from the web may not be the best resource for dream research. There’s a “garbage in, garbage out” danger with some AI tools trained on low-quality data.

Greater progress for dreamers will come when an AI system is trained using high-quality information about dreams and dreaming in psychology, history, art, religion, and neuroscience. This is not a distant fantasy—the information exists right now, and no technological obstacles are preventing its use for developing the kind of dreamer-optimized AI system outlined here. When such a specially designed tool finally appears, the future of AI-enhanced dream interpretation will truly have arrived.