I turn into a large language model when I'm asleep
And I make some great shows.
Whenever I had nightmares as a little boy, I would decide to stop 'watching' and wake myself up. I would try to close my eyes, and I’d wake up.
Experiencing a dream is a unique perspective. It’s like you’re focusing on that dream with a lazy lucid eye that isn't actually taking anything in with what you might call ‘analytical logic’, and is just experiencing it in a vague emotional sense.
It happened to me this morning too. Not a nightmare; quite a delightful dream actually. It was about two gay Korean men scouting new restaurant locations on a bus tour of London. Then they were in New York, then other cities that you definitely can't get a bus to either, and then they were singing about their love for each other and how they could predict each other’s sentences and sing in-sync in Korean to prove it. At least I assume it was Korean: I don't speak it and perhaps my brain knew that it had made something too weird at this point, and woke me up.
That dream felt like a perfect production. The writing was excellent, the singing pitch perfect; impeccable camera work. The content was truly incoherent but I couldn't write lines which felt so good if I was conscious.
It's an odd experience watching your brain create some silent film based on a bunch of memories and experiences it has mashed together. It felt like something an AI would make. “Oh crap,” I thought to myself soon after that realisation. This is exactly what the AI people say: human brains are no different from neural networks. Human brains hallucinate too, but we get them back on track when we force them to acknowledge the real world. By extension, it’s possible to make a human out of silicon.
In the AI lore, dreaming is what happens when we let our neural net brains go wild and create outputs, like my bus-going Korean restaurateurs, which obviously couldn't happen in reality.
Why does this only happen when I'm asleep though, and not every time I go to a dark quiet room and close my eyes?
To me, the reason dreams don't exist in the real world is not because they collide with reality, but because they collide with your consciousness, which is where that ‘analytical logic’ part lives.
It is this consciousness that forces the dreamy part of my brain to get in line and get ready for operating in the real world again.
Yes, I turn into a large language model when I asleep, but having just woken up, I'm not merely a 'chatbot that's come alive'. Instead, I've just turned on a completely distinct aspect of what it means to be human: my consciousness.
Unfortunately, this is the part of my brain that stops me making brilliant, pioneering productions in my sleep, but it does remind me that I'm alive. Life is about synthesising both halves: time to edit this piece I guess.
