Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

[Michael McMahon]

“Yet these bizarre monologues do highlight an interesting aspect of the dream world: the creation of connections between things that didn't seem connected before. When you think about it, this isn't too unlike a description of what creative people do in their work – connecting ideas and concepts that nobody thought to connect before in a way that appears to make sense...

Making the links between pieces of information that our daytime rational minds see as separate seems to be easiest when we're offline, drifting through the dreamworld.

It is this function of sleep that might also explain why those first moments upon waking can be among our most creative. Dreams may seem weird, but just because they don’t make sense to your rational waking consciousness doesn’t make them purposeless.”
- Tom Stafford BBC

New thoughts, ideas and intentions come to us throughout the day. These may be constructed in our psyche through synthesising some of our previous concepts and experiences. It feels as though our previous conceptual viewpoints our recoded and reformulated to generate creativity and originality.

“Twain wrote that, ‘The kernel, the soul, let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances is plagiarism.” Twain believed that there was no such thing an original thought or an original idea, because every subject on Earth had been pored over, written about and analyzed. Does that mean that originality itself is a myth, and that no creative idea exists independent of another idea? The answer is yes and no. Yes, there are original ways to express thoughts, ideas, concepts and philosophies, but no, the actual subject upon which these thought, ideas, concepts and philosophies are based on, are not original...

Twain further explained his belief about plagiarism by writing that nearly every idea was recycled from another idea, whether it was done on purpose, or through some collective unconscious process. Twain writes, “For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.”

Twain brings up several good points, by citing the fact that even when artists plagiarize, they remain blissfully unaware that they have stolen thoughts and ideas, because they discount how much they are affected by external factors, even if those factors are not present when they sit down to create.”
- Unicheck

Dreams possibly assist in creating and extending these new and unforeseen associations.

[Michael McMahon]

“Mystical psychosis is a term coined by Arthur J. Deikman in the early 1970s to characterize first-person accounts of psychotic experiences that are strikingly similar to reports of mystical experiences... Deikman thought the mystical experience was brought about through a "deautomatization" or undoing of habitual psychological structures that organize, limit, select, and interpret perceptual stimuli.”
-Wikipedia

It has sometimes been commented that dreams resemble aspects of psychosis. Maybe the brain deliberately induces the tangential thoughts we have while dreaming in order to reappraise our subconscious beliefs and intentions. The atemporality of sleep can perhaps prompt new insights and reinterpretations of past experiences.

“I think it's important to note that dreaming essentially is a time when we all become flagrantly psychotic. And before you perhaps dismiss that diagnosis, I'll give you five good reasons, because last night when you were dreaming, first you started to see things which were not there, so you were hallucinating.

Second, you believe things that couldn't possibly be true, so you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person, so you're suffering from disorientation. Fourth, you had wildly fluctuating emotions like a pendulum, something that we call being affectively labile. And then, how wonderful? You woke up this morning and you forgot most if not all of that dream experience, so you're suffering from amnesia...

The first (benefit) is actually creativity, because it's during REM sleep and dreaming specifically when the brain starts to collide all of the information that you've recently learned together with all of this back catalog of autobiographical information that you've got stored up in the brain. And it starts to build novel connections, it's almost like group therapy for memories. And through this pattern of informational alchemy at night, we create a revised mind wide web of associations. And you can start to divine new novel insights into previously unsolved problems, so that you wake up the next morning with new novel insights into previously unsolved problems, so that you wake up the next morning with new solutions, and it's probably the reason that no one has ever told you that you should stay awake on a problem. Instead, people tell you to sleep on a problem.”
- Neuroscientist Matthew Walker

[Michael McMahon]

Dreams don’t necessarily have to be precognitive in order to have a causal effect. Psychology informs us of how our preconceptions and intuitions can indirectly influence us.

Dreams could conceivably create self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies. The surreal scenarios that we experience within dreams can cause us to engage in post hoc rationalisations. Our emotions are stimulated to assess how we would react if such a situation arose in real life. One can reason backward in a dream to see what must be done to avoid or seek the simulated event. Negative feedback could still be at play even if we forget our dreams. It may potentially motivate us to not do whatever had occurred in the dream by corrupting the memory of it. We can’t intend to do something if we’re unable to actually remember it in the first place! This might be reminiscent of free won’t and the need to “rebel” against our deterministic fate as Camus mentioned with absurdism.

“A self-defeating prophecy (self-destroying or self-denying in some sources) is the complementary opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy; a prediction that prevents what it predicts from happening. This is also known as the prophet's dilemma.

A self-defeating prophecy can be the result of rebellion to the prediction. If the audience of a prediction has an interest in seeing it falsified, and its fulfillment depends on their actions or inaction, their actions upon hearing it will make the prediction less plausible. If a prediction is made with this outcome specifically in mind, it is commonly referred to as reverse psychology or warning.

... If a prediction of a negative outcome is made, but the outcome is positive because of negative feedback resulting from the rebellion, then that is a self-defeating prophecy.”
-Wikipedia

[Michael McMahon]

“Depersonalization can consist of a detachment within the self, regarding one's mind or body, or being a detached observer of oneself. Subjects feel they have changed and that the world has become vague, dreamlike, less real, lacking in significance or being outside reality while looking in... Also, a recognition of a self breaks down.”
-Wikipedia

It could be that the impersonal and holistic nature of sleep allows us to transcend any of our repetitive or redundant thinking patterns. The mind-expanding dissociative features of dreams might internally trigger a greater receptive and objective approach towards our problems. Perhaps the delayed latency of dreams helps break the cycle of endless regress that would happen with real-time cognition:

“The reason why this is a fallacy may be understood by asking how the homunculus "sees" the internal movie. The obvious answer is that there is another homunculus inside the first homunculus's "head" or "brain" looking at this "movie". But that raises the question of how this homunculus sees the "outside world". To answer that seems to require positing another homunculus inside this second homunculus's head, and so forth. In other words, a situation of infinite regress is created. The problem with the homunculus argument is that it tries to account for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain... Therefore, so the argument goes, theories of mind that imply or state explicitly that cognition is rule bound cannot be correct unless some way is found to "ground" the regress.”
-Wikipedia

[Michael McMahon]

“The existential crisis occurs when one recognizes that even the decision to either refrain from action or withhold assent to a particular choice is, in itself, a choice. In other words, humankind is "condemned" to freedom.”
- Wikipedia

The sensation of cognitive dissonance forces us to reconcile our actions with our thoughts. The randomness of our thoughts are counteracted by an instinctive feeling of stress and tension if we act against our true beliefs. This makes us responsible for our actions. Free choices are inherently uncertain which can lead to angst.

“Stress can be triggered by a problem that may on the surface seem impossible to solve. Learning how to find solutions to your problems will help you feel more in control thereby lowering your level of stress.”
- skillsyouneed website

Stress is an uncomfortable feeling which functions as a disincentive. It compels us to weigh up the pros and cons of a decision. The juxtaposition of harsh reality with idealised dreams and ambitions can accentuate where we are falling short. We can refocus and retry by freely brainstorming different alternatives. Stress can sometimes be the determining factor when picking a path to choose; even if it’s just the least worst option.

“The second benefit of dream sleep is essentially a form of overnight therapy. It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day. And so that we wake up the next morning feeling better about those experiences. So you can think of dream sleep as emotional first aid and it sort of offers this nocturnal soothing balm that smoothes those painful stinging edges of difficult experiences. So it's not time that heals all wounds, but it's time during dream sleep that provides you with emotional convalescence.”
- Matthew Walker neuroscientist

If dreams can affect how we perceive stress then it would heighten our feeling of freedom. Sleep has often been seen as a form of stress relief and management. I think this could contribute to free will in and of itself. Different stress levels can tip the scales when we are analysing our options. The strangeness of dreams can help increase our appreciation of the contrasting realness and orderliness of this physical world.

[detail]

Dreaming can be quite surrealistic , and can exhibit large scale unlogic and ununderstandable parts. Is this not some kind of garbage collection of the brain like in the java jvm ?

[Michael McMahon]

“The first stage is preparation, when you search out any information that might be relevant...

Once you have mulled over all the relevant pieces and pushed your rational mind to the limits, you can let the problem simmer. This is the incubation stage, when you digest all you have gathered... As the saying goes, "You sleep on it."

The unconscious mind is far more suited to creative insight than the conscious mind. Ideas are free to recombine with other ideas in novel patterns and unpredictable associations. It is also the storehouse of everything you know, including things you can't readily call into awareness. Further, the unconscious speaks to us in ways that go beyond words, including the rich feelings and deep imagery of the senses.

We are more open to insights from the unconscious mind when we are not thinking of anything in particular. That is why daydreams are so useful in the quest for creativity... With luck; immersion and daydreaming lead to illumination, when all of a sudden the answer comes to you as if from nowhere.

In creative problem-solving, a mistake is an experiment to learn from, valuable information about what to try next...

While in a flow state, people lose all self-consciousness. The Zen idea of no-mind is similar: a state of complete absorption is what one is doing... No-mindedness is not unconsciousness, some kind of vague spaciness. On the contrary, it is a precise awareness during which one is undisturbed by the mind's usual distracting inner chatter.

One ingredient of creativity is open-ended time...”
- Psychology Today

The subconscious could just test out different computations while we’re inattentive and unconscious. We can make mistakes in dreams without suffering the consequences as it’s not reality. Might dreaming be comparable to a brute force search? Our daily tasks aren’t always overly complex. Choosing what to do over the weekend is still a manifestation of your free will even though it’s not too complicated. So the sample space of our potential options can be small and therefore amenable to a brute-force attack. This would enhance our creative ability by simulating the effects of a certain course of action.

“In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a very general problem-solving technique and algorithmic paradigm that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's statement.

While a brute-force search is simple to implement, and will always find a solution if it exists, its cost is proportional to the number of candidate solutions – which in many practical problems tends to grow very quickly as the size of the problem increases (Combinatorial explosion). Therefore, brute-force search is typically used when the problem size is limited, or when there are problem-specific heuristics that can be used to reduce the set of candidate solutions to a manageable size. The method is also used when the simplicity of implementation is more important than speed.”
- Wikipedia

[Michael McMahon]

“With cognitive reframing, you can change the way you look at something and consequently change how you experience it... That kind of an approach enables you to implement the ancient wisdom that you can’t always control what happens to you, but you can certainly control how you react to different situations – no matter how tough your position might be... With cognitive reframing, you try to find a more constructive interpretation of what is happening to you... Different territories on your subjective map of reality are called schemas. Schemas are mental structures providing a framework for representing some aspect of the world. They help you organize the vast majority of information in a manageable way... While schemas are really hard to change, switching to a new frame can be a little bit easier. That’s where cognitive reframing comes into play. You take a very specific situation from your life and you try to develop a more positive view on it – with that, you influence your thinking pattern and feelings about that particular situation, but you also slightly update your schemas and overall subjective reality in a more positive way.”
- agileleanlife internet site

The opposite of stress is confidence. This is a pleasant emotion that encourages us to pursue our goals. It imbues us with optimism by reminding us of the achievability of our plans. It may be that some dreams can inspire us by replaying or simulating positive experiences while unconscious. This isn’t too far off the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy:

“A self-fulfilling prophecy is the sociopsychological phenomenon of someone "predicting" or expecting something, and this "prediction" or expectation coming true simply because the person believes it will and the person's resulting behaviors aligning to fulfill the belief. This suggests that people's beliefs influence their actions... A self-fulfilling prophecy may be a form of causality loop... The prophecy itself (can) serve as the impetus for (our) actions, and thus it is self-fulfilling.”
Wikipedia

Thus our free will is influenced by both positive (confidence) and negative (stress) factors. We can voluntarily withstand stress in the short term in order to accomplish our long term aspirations.

“Just as feeling close to others increases prosocial giving, feeling close to one's future self motivates people to delay present gratification in order to benefit themselves in the future.”
- Wikipedia

[Michael McMahon]

“Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened. Counterfactual thinking is, as it states: "counter to the facts". These thoughts consist of the "What if?" and the "If I had only..." that occur when thinking of how things could have turned out differently. Counterfactual thoughts include things that – in the present – now could never happen in reality because they solely pertain to events that have occurred in the past...

One of the functional reasons for this is to correct for mistakes and to avoid making them again in the future. If a person is able to consider another outcome based on a different path, they may take that path in the future and avoid the undesired outcome. It is obvious that the past cannot be changed, however, it is likely that similar situations may occur in the future, and thus we take our counterfactual thoughts as a learning experience...

When thinking of downward counterfactual thinking, or ways that the situation could have turned out worse, people tend to feel a sense of relief... In the case of upward counterfactual thinking, people tend to feel more negative affect (e.g., regret, disappointment) about the situation. When thinking in this manner, people focus on ways that the situation could have turned out more positively.”
- Wikipedia

The peculiar and non-numerical content of dreams and nightmares might be indicative of counterfactual reasoning. The alternate realities we see during sleep may allow us to come up with inductive tentative solutions to our daily stresses and struggles. In a way this immersion into the virtual reality of sleep permits us to communicate through time with our imagined past and potential future selves.

As opposed to our conscious waking mindset, dreams offers us the possibility of “postselection”. We can reason backward within a dream. We can use a trial and error approach much faster as our thoughts are automated and subconscious inside a dream. We then only focus on the results of where it worked to solve the simulated problem.

[Belindi]

Counter factual thinking is more commonly called suspension of disbelief. We suspend disbelief when we attend to a fictional narrative. Dreams are fictional narratives. Dreams are also absurd and surreal. If we purpose anything useful by an absurd and surreal narrative we need to interpret it.

The interpretation of a dream is like the interpretation of any symbolic artefact, and requires the interpreter's creating imagination if they have any. There is no guarantee any interpretation of any dream or any artefact will be universally acceptable and it might be completely eccentric.

[Sculptor1]

Counter factual thinking is more commonly called suspension of disbelief. We suspend disbelief when we attend to a fictional narrative. Dreams are fictional narratives. Dreams are also absurd and surreal. If we purpose anything useful by an absurd and surreal narrative we need to interpret it.

The interpretation of a dream is like the interpretation of any symbolic artefact, and requires the interpreter's creating imagination if they have any. There is no guarantee any interpretation of any dream or any artefact will be universally acceptable and it might be completely eccentric.

I'm skeptical to the point of utter rejection by some people's claims that dreams can be interpreted. The only person that can understand a dream is the dreamer.
Further, I do not think that dreams hold some hidden message, or massive insight into a person's life, far from is.
The idea that sleep is a mechanism for reorganising messy data, chimes well. Life is full of ritual and habitual process, and expectations. As we change and our lives change the brain reoganises, memories and impressions. As a dreamer we are witness to these moving impressions and try to narritivise it.
Talk of archetypes is not productive since we each have our own. Their appearance in dreams is not a message just a random dip into a mass of data, in which one part of the brain makes sense of a jumble in the other.
Encryption is a loaded word, a highly organised and purposeful process that does not really apply in any meaningful sense here.

[Belindi]

Counter factual thinking is more commonly called suspension of disbelief. We suspend disbelief when we attend to a fictional narrative. Dreams are fictional narratives. Dreams are also absurd and surreal. If we purpose anything useful by an absurd and surreal narrative we need to interpret it.

The interpretation of a dream is like the interpretation of any symbolic artefact, and requires the interpreter's creating imagination if they have any. There is no guarantee any interpretation of any dream or any artefact will be universally acceptable and it might be completely eccentric.

I'm skeptical to the point of utter rejection by some people's claims that dreams can be interpreted. The only person that can understand a dream is the dreamer.
Further, I do not think that dreams hold some hidden message, or massive insight into a person's life, far from is.
The idea that sleep is a mechanism for reorganising messy data, chimes well. Life is full of ritual and habitual process, and expectations. As we change and our lives change the brain reoganises, memories and impressions. As a dreamer we are witness to these moving impressions and try to narritivise it.
Talk of archetypes is not productive since we each have our own. Their appearance in dreams is not a message just a random dip into a mass of data, in which one part of the brain makes sense of a jumble in the other.
Encryption is a loaded word, a highly organised and purposeful process that does not really apply in any meaningful sense here.

As a matter of fact, other people's dream material is not uncommonly used by the audiences for all sorts of artists.E.g. Coleridge and Yeats the poets. E.g. Dali the surrealist painter.

[Michael McMahon]

“ The least glamorous explanation for any dream is that it serves as a sort of data dump — a clearing of the day’s useless memories and a caching of the valuable ones. Researchers had long suspected that that process, if it exists, plays out between the hippocampus — which controls memory — and the neocortex, which governs higher order thought.

A 2007 study at the Max Planck Medical Institute in Heidelberg, Germany helped confirm that theory: working with anesthetized mice, the researchers found that as the neocortex fires during sleep, it signals various regions in the hippocampus to upload whatever information they’ve been holding in short-term storage. The hippocampus is then cleared to gather more the next day, while the neocortex decides what to transfer to long-term memory and what to discard. As that data streams by on the computer screen of the sleeping mind, some of it gets snatched up and randomly stitched into the crazy quilt of dreams, which often only vaguely resemble the literal content of the information.”
- Time Magazine Website

Even if for the sake of argument we viewed dreams solely in a materialistic and physical way, that still doesn’t preclude it being an encryption. I think erasing our sentient memories would be far more complicated than erasing a computer’s memory disk. Consciousness seems to be far more complex. How do you delete an event from a person’s memory without that person being able to identify a perceptible gap or an inconsistency in their own recollection? How do you ensure they don’t become conscious during the deletion procedure? I mentioned in the first thread how encryption is also used to delete information:

“Cryptographic erasure roughly means encrypting the data first, and when it is time to delete it, discarding the encryption key instead. Under computational assumptions that the underlying cryptographic primitives cannot be broken (and we can all agree that cryptography is the strongest link in a secure system), without the key, that data could never be decrypted again. It is as good as deleted.”
- darkreading website
-

[Michael McMahon]

Belindi: “The interpretation of a dream is like the interpretation of any symbolic artefact, and requires the interpreter's creating imagination if they have any.”

What if consciousness behaved like a high-level programming language? We obviously don’t need to know the actual underlying physiology and antagonistic muscle arrangements to move our arms or legs. The biological component is like the machine code.

But this applies to some of our subconscious thinking patterns too. Sam Harris commented on how unaware we are of the semantics that dictate the very next word that comes into our mind, “If you pay attention, you can see that you no more decide the next thing you think, than the next thing I say. Thoughts simply appear in conscience... And we continually notice changes in our experience, in thoughts and moods and sensations and behavior, but we are utterly unaware of the neuropsychological events that produce those changes... And even the simplest conscious sensations are built upon unconscious mechanism and unconscious processing, of which we are fundamentally unaware.” So the subconscious would serve the role of an assembly language through nerves giving instructions to the physical body from the mind.

Consciousness itself corresponds to a high-level language. We can form abstract thoughts and “symbolic artefacts” or concepts based on our physical sensual perception.

Dreams could feasibly have a compiler or translator role by converting our complex thoughts and extrapolations into the subconscious assembly language. The unconscious mind inculcates different thought patterns by repeating these oneiric simulations and thought experiments.

[Belindi]

Belindi: “The interpretation of a dream is like the interpretation of any symbolic artefact, and requires the interpreter's creating imagination if they have any.”

What if consciousness behaved like a high-level programming language? We obviously don’t need to know the actual underlying physiology and antagonistic muscle arrangements to move our arms or legs. The biological component is like the machine code.

But this applies to some of our subconscious thinking patterns too. Sam Harris commented on how unaware we are of the semantics that dictate the very next word that comes into our mind, “If you pay attention, you can see that you no more decide the next thing you think, than the next thing I say. Thoughts simply appear in conscience... And we continually notice changes in our experience, in thoughts and moods and sensations and behavior, but we are utterly unaware of the neuropsychological events that produce those changes... And even the simplest conscious sensations are built upon unconscious mechanism and unconscious processing, of which we are fundamentally unaware.” So the subconscious would serve the role of an assembly language through nerves giving instructions to the physical body from the mind.

Consciousness itself corresponds to a high-level language. We can form abstract thoughts and “symbolic artefacts” or concepts based on our physical sensual perception.
Dreams could feasibly have a compiler or translator role by converting our complex thoughts and extrapolations into the subconscious assembly language. The unconscious mind inculcates different thought patterns by repeating these oneiric simulations and thought experiments.

The physiology of dreaming is the province of neuroscientists.