I’ve written a little bit about my adventures with artificial intelligence. In this post, I’d like to discuss one corner of those adventures in greater detail. In another post, I’ve written about a specific dream I had the other night.
This post, though, isn’t about a specific dream. Rather, it’s about my dreams in general, and about how I use AI to help me keep track of them. I think I might have written about this a while ago. If I did, my apologies.
For years now, I’ve documented my dreams. Once upon a time, by jotting them down in a notebook I kept by the side of my bed. Then by recording voice memos of them in my phone, and copying the extremely poor transcriptions of them into my journal. In the last year or two, I’ve stepped up the accuracy of the transcriptions and the quality of the content that I’m posting into my journal by using a workflow I built, using a workflow manager called Pipedream.
Nowadays, when I have a dream, if I wake up in the middle of the night with a memory of it in my head, I’ll record a brief voice memo, and then I’ll upload that voice memo to a Google Drive folder called Dreams. Pipedream is set to monitor that folder. Whenever a file is added, it downloads that file, transmits it to OpenAI’s Whisper transcription engine, and then it does a little processing of it. It lists all the characters in the dream, it lists all the emotions in the dream, all the actions in the dream, all the settings in the dream. It summarizes the dream, and it transcribes it, and then it sends it back to me in the form of an email to my journal.
[When I first started this project, I experimented with asking it to offer interpretations. Even my asking rankled slightly: I’m not a big believer in the idea of generic dream interpretations. I don’t believe anything always represents anything in dreams. Rather, I think the meaning of objects and people and actions and places in dreams is highly personal and idiosyncratic. Sure, a cigar might represent a penis to some people, sometimes, in some dreams. But depending on the dreamer’s associations and history, a cigar could mean something very different. If their father or grandfather died of mouth cancer after a life of smoking, a cigar might represent death. If they had burnt their hand on a cigar as a child, it might represent terror or pain.
So, to begin with, I wasn’t all that excited about the notion that ChatGPT or Claude might have anything brilliant to offer in the way of an interpretation. And I was right. Try though I might, I couldn’t extract anything particularly useful from either ChatGPT or Claude in the way of dream interpretations. They’re much better at helping me keep track of my dreams, helping me make sense of the objective data they contain, allowing me to ask and answer questions about that.
Once in a while, I’ll take the entire compendium of dreams, which since last August, I’ve been putting not just in my journal, but in a single document of nothing but dreams. Occasionally, I subject that document to analysis. The prompt I use, which I’m still refining, is as follows:
And I’ve set it up so that if I send a blank email to a dedicated email address, Pipedream will submit my dream document to both ChatGPT and Claude with this prompt and respond.
Here’s what Claude said, today:
Analyzing this collection of dreams, several notable patterns and recurring themes emerge:
Transportation and Travel:
- Numerous dreams feature planes, trains, buses, and cars
- Often involves complications, delays, or mechanical issues
- Frequently includes anxiety about missing connections or being late
- Multiple instances of being in airports or transit stations
Physical Spaces:
- Many dreams occur in buildings with complex internal geography
- Frequent appearances of bathrooms, often with accessibility issues
- Regular settings include hotels, apartments, and public spaces
- Several dreams feature beach locations
Relationships and Social Interactions:
- Regular appearances of family members, particularly wife, son, and the dreamer's father
- Professional relationships, often involving complex dynamics
- Sexual or romantic encounters, often involving tension or complexity
- Social gatherings with unclear boundaries or expectations
Anxiety and Control:
- Recurring themes of being unprepared or running late
- Frequent situations involving loss of control (mechanical failures, bodily functions)
- Anxiety about professional competence or social standing
- Concerns about safety and security
Environmental Threats:
- Multiple dreams featuring fires, natural disasters, or environmental catastrophes
- Wars or conflicts appearing in various forms
- Themes of evacuation or escape
Money and Resources:
- Several dreams involve financial transactions or concerns
- References to business dealings and professional obligations
- Anxiety about having or managing resources
Physical Comfort/Discomfort:
- Recurring themes of needing to use bathrooms
- Physical ailments or limitations
- Temperature and weather conditions affecting comfort
The dreams frequently position the dreamer as someone navigating between different social worlds or responsibilities, often while managing various forms of anxiety or uncertainty. There is a notable pattern of dreams involving transportation difficulties, suggesting possible concerns about life transitions or movement between different aspects of life.
And here’s what ChatGPT said:
The collection of dreams displays an intricate network of emotional and psychological motifs that recur throughout. These can be grouped into key thematic categories:
1. Recurrent People:
- Family Members: Wife, son, and the dreamer’s father appear frequently.
- Friends and Colleagues: Figures such as A, J, J, S, and others related to professional or intellectual life repeat. They often function as mirrors or foils for the dreamer's sense of competence, guilt, or social standing.
- Multiple scenes involving ... subordinate figures (N, A, S), often linked with anxiety about appropriate behavior, leadership, or communication failures.
2. Places:
- Transportation Environments: Airplanes, subways, buses, and cars recur prominently. These settings often break down or demand problematic navigation, suggesting struggles with transition, directionality, or autonomy within structured systems.
- Domestic or Semi-Domestic Spaces: Hotel rooms, childhood homes, beach settings, and apartments dominate. These frequently deteriorate (falling ceilings, infestations, broken toilets, clutter) and tend to symbolize loss of control or comfort within erstwhile familiar domains.
- Institutional Settings: Schools, universities, offices, theaters, and synagogues appear. The actions within these spaces often concern expectations, performance, exclusion, or public exposure.
3. Emotional Patterns:
- Shame and Exposure: The dreamer is frequently exposed in ways that provoke shame — visible stains, bodily functions gone awry, forgetting lines, being caught doing something private in public, or letting others down through lateness or poor preparation.
- Anxiety about Competence: Anxiety about meeting obligations, lateness, preparation, or performance undergirds many narratives — especially those involving travel logistics, performances, or caretaking responsibilities.
- Fear and Safety: Many dreams have subtle or overt threats — planes falling, wildfires, terrorist invasions, car crashes, war settings, or collapsing infrastructure. The dreamer often attempts to protect self or others but is either powerless, late, or ineffectual.
- Longing and Exclusion: The dreamer often finds themselves observing pleasure, connection, or eroticism among others while feeling apart or denied access. At times envy or frustration emerges in response to joy enacted by others (musical festivals, flirtations, sexual experimentation).
- Mourning and Loss: Dreams frequently touch on death (deceased mother, funereal settings, dying animals) or uncontactable loved ones, including anxieties around missed connections or late arrivals.
4. Symbolic Actions:
- Cleaning, Packing, Transporting: The dreamer frequently faces the task of moving items — often delayed, sabotaged, or left unfinished. This includes frantic attempts to pack for travel, laundry undone, garbage uncollected, or lost possessions. These actions often accompany emotional disarray or mounting pressure.
- Urination/Defecation/Illness: Repeated reference to bodily fluids — especially urination and vomiting — commonly in public or unprepared settings, emphasizes themes of corporeal vulnerability and loss of social containment.
- Flying: Both literal (via airplane) and surreal (manual flight) flying appears repeatedly. It is linked to freedom and fear, often taking place above recognizable landscapes but ending hurtling toward unpredictability.
- Technology and Communication Breakdown: Phones frequently misbehave or fail to function properly (missed calls, wrong numbers, voicemail confusion). This suggests strained or ambivalent connections, communications that fail to complete, or expectations unmet.
5. Themes:
- Performance and Inadequacy: Many dreams explicitly feature performances — missed cues, forgotten lines, rehearsal, acting, speech-making — often with a sense of public failure or bodily collapse.
- Detailed Bureaucratic Struggles: The dreamer often confronts obstacles in mundane systems — insurance problems, security checks, seating arrangements, elevator malfunctions, camp enrollments — commonly evoking helplessness against Kafkaesque processes.
- Sexuality and Polyamory: Desire for experimentation, inclusion, voyeurism, or casual eroticism recurs. Often tempered by shame, fear of exposure, or ambivalence....
- Time: Time pressure and temporal uncertainty pervade — missed appointments, unclear clocks, unread messages, alternate timelines. The capacity to manage time is frequently challenged, resulting in unmet obligations or confrontations.
Notably, several dreams are explicitly nested — dreams within dreams, or dreams discussed within dreams — indicating meta-awareness and the desire to gain control over the unconscious.
In combination, the dreams portray a personality vigilant about control, public perception, and relational coherence, yet immersed in a world that is often disordered, under strain, or eluding grasp. The dreamer is repeatedly thrust into the roles of observer, caretaker, scapegoat, or confused participant, grappling with the imperative to restore order, communicate clearly, and perform well, even as structures collapse, interactions devolve, or meanings blur.
Sometimes I’ll take the compendium of dreams and do a little more processing of it on my own. This morning for example, I asked chat GPT, Claude and Gemini to take a look at my dreams since last August and comment on trends in my dream concerns. How have they been shifting over the time since then? I like using all three of the large language models. They tend to have different strengths and weaknesses to excel in different areas. And their relative strengths in different areas seem to shift over time as they leapfrog one another. But at the moment, Claude and chat GPT are pretty close to one another. Here’s what Claude said, when I asked, “Review this compendium of my dreams since last August. I’m interested in your thoughts about how my concerns have shifted over the time since August. What has changed?”
Looking through your dreams from August 2024 to June 2025, several significant shifts in concerns emerge:
Early Period (August-October 2024):
Interpersonal Anxiety and Control
Your dreams were heavily populated with relationship tensions - conflicts about packing, feeling criticized, being left behind or abandoned. There's pronounced anxiety about performance and competence (the Pirates of Penzance dream where you fail catastrophically, missing flights, being unprepared). Dreams frequently feature you as disorganized, late, or disappointing others.
Mid Period (November 2024-February 2025):
Violence and Threat
A marked shift toward dreams involving physical violence, war, and external threats. Multiple dreams feature you fighting, being attacked, or witnessing violence. The apocalyptic dreams with bombing, skiing robots, and military threats suggest heightened anxiety about safety and world events. Your aggression becomes more prominent - you're tackling attackers, throwing people down stairwells.
Later Period (March-June 2025): Sexuality and Creative Expression
The most striking change is the emergence of explicitly sexual content. Dreams begin featuring sex parties, dominance dynamics, discussions of taste and pleasure. There's increased comfort with sexual language and scenarios. Simultaneously, you're dealing with practical concerns (construction, coffee makers, car trouble) but with less catastrophic anxiety.
Persistent Themes That Evolve:
Wife: [confidential]
Son: [confidential]
Transportation: Planes, trains, cars feature throughout, but early dreams involve missing connections while later ones involve mechanical problems you handle competently
What's Notable:
The progression suggests movement from external validation anxiety toward internal exploration of desire and identity. The violent period may represent working through aggression and boundary-setting. The recent sexual content suggests integration of previously split-off aspects of yourself.
Your dreams show increasing agency - less victimization, more active problem-solving, greater comfort with complex desires.
None of this is news to me. I know my dreams. I know my insides. I know my concerns, my worries, my hopes, my longings. No large language model is going to discover any radically surprising feature of my psyche of which I’m unaware. At the same time though, there is something interesting and even a little thrilling about seeing my insides so accurately rendered from the substrate of my dreams by something as strange as a large language model.
