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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

If this ever results in a way to record my dreams I would be very, very interested in that. Controlling them, on the other hand, seems counterproductive.

The whole point of dreaming, for me at least, is an exercise in pure, raw creativity. There are many things I cannot do, or do not want to do, in my everyday life. Dreams allow a safe and adventurous exploration of those things.

Things like this always remind me of the Yeats quote:

"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"

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Was Yeats thinking of sleeping "dreams" or future aspirations, though? I also wonder if the brain's "self-cleaning" process (which is what dreams are^) would function any longer if you had conscious control over it. Maybe that would actually turn out to have harmful side effects to your health? I've thought of this before when my brother-in-law talks about lucid dreaming.

^ https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-sle...

Both I think. Or maybe not. But you definitely make a good point about the cleaning - we probably do not want to control our dreams. And it also has a function in long term memory (basically the equivalent of writing RAM to disk) so who knows how controlling them might affect that.

> The whole point of dreaming,

for the scientific community is... "we're not sure what it does, yet."

I worry a fair bit that we'll keep seeing a push of tech into dreams, and as a result we'll start morphing systems with purposes, and in ways, which we don't at all understand.

Dubiously positive second order effects for the humans, and excellent product lines for some future tech companies, abound. We already went through this with codifying human interactions we didn't really understand in social media. Odds are high we'll do it again.

We do know it is tied to long term memory though right? I thought a large portion of dreaming was "archiving" from the shorter term into the long term. Like writing RAM to disk.

I don’t think creativity and dream control are mutually exclusive. I do some of my best creative thinking while I’m lucid dreaming.

That is objectively hard to prove though without a more accurate recording of what you are dreaming - it is possible you come up with some very creative thinking while not lucid dreaming and just do not remember it clearly

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