Dreams, AI, archetypes

I happen to be one of those people who very frequently remembers his dreams. With a collection of 200+ dreams, I turned them into images via ChatGPT, and selected the most interesting ones.

It takes quite a bit to load because I included the full-size images.

I have more than 200 documents with dreams, some shorter, some longer, some more detailed, some less. Some quite stationary, some incredibly dynamic. I selected the ones that yielded pictures that were visually appealing, and that seem to contain those archaic remnants that Jung and Freud talk about in detail in their books. These include shiny things coming from the sky, shapeshifter animals, and sometimes mythical creatures. When I first dreamed about these, I was actually surprised for up until I had these experiences I was convinced that everything about dream analysis is nonsense.

In fact, visually exploring these archetypes was one of the main reasons I undertook this whole thing. This is why many of the dreams contain the sky, shooting stars, fish, birds and reptiles, etc. I have many other dreams that are more normal, but are either not interesting, or so filled with personal references that even GPT could not create anything appealing. Here are my favorites:

Collecting dreams

I keep my laptop on my nightstand, and my notes app ready to be used on my phone, so that whenever I wake up, dreams, images and impressions still fresh, I could scribble everything down before they would magically vanish.

According to what I read from Jung and Freud, I try to note down very clearly what things from real life the certain places, people, or feelings that appear might be related to.

Generating Images

Before feeding the dream text to ChatGPT, I did the following:

• corrected typos (I jot down everything quickly and sometimes in a mix of languages)
• disambiguated personal references to be as objectively describable as possible. For example, ‘a place that looks like my apartment’ would be replaced with a more accurate description of that actual place,
• removed references to real people from my life, for obvious reasons. Most often I replaced them with a description of the aspects that were relevant/memorable in the dream(length of hair, age, height, etc.)

The most challenging part is getting ChatGPT to generate one single image, instead of a comic-like layout. Most likely it was trained on massive amounts of comics. Since my dreams are dynamic, and involve a lot of movement, changes of scenes, feelings and impressions, it probably did have a hard time fitting everything in one scene. The prompts I used, however, are quite simple:

I have a dream which has a lot of strange elements. 
I wrote it down and i want you to generate some pictures out of it

Apart from this, I only fed it the cleaned dream text, and sometimes had to repeat some form of the following prompt:

Do not include any text in the image. 
Do not use a comic-like layout. 
Make the whole thing one single scene.

I did not give it any other style guide, I wanted it to pick the most appropriate by itself. I did want to exclude text because sometimes it generated the dream text inside the image, and I didn’t want to expose that in all cases. Sometimes it still refused to exclude text, but whenever it didn’t expose any detail I did not want to, I left it like so.

Sometimes it gave an error, with the following message:

While the tool is advanced, it sometimes encounters challenges 
with scenes that are highly intricate, contain multiple transitions,
 or include elements that are abstract or surreal in nature. 
Your dream description combines these aspects, which might be why 
the tool is having issues generating an appropriate image.

In these cases I tried to simplify the description and exclude those aspects that might have confused the AI, but were not necessarily important in the final image.

Example

This is one of the dreams that I am not too embarrassed to publish, but exemplifies quite well the nature of my dreams and how I write them down. You’ll surely find out which picture it is about.

I was in my grandparents' old house's yard and I saw a cinege nest, from which a small tit bird almost fell. After a while as I saw it battle on he branches, it did
actually fall, I was staying underneath to catch it, but I only amortized the fall, I did not catch it. The bird however, on the floor turned into 
a not so small lizard, and I suddenly found myself not in the yard but inside the main room of that house. I had to cut down a tv wire in order to access
the nest and put the thing back. I also had to catch the lizard down and unpack a blue pair of scissors. I cut the coaxial cable down,
and i wantd to put the thing back. I tried to fix the cable
with the lizard turned bird. I was not at all surprised by the fact that it was supposed to be that half-feathered bird, and not a full lizard as it was.

I’m still considering publishing the dream texts themselves, and I want to create a dataset out of the 200+ documents.