AI Dream Analysis
Reflecting upon 2024, one of the greatest challenges I faced was poor sleep quality. Facing burnout at work, I would often fall into bed as soon as I got home, and my lack of a wind-down routine was causing me to wake up repeatedly throughout the night. While the cycle that formed was mostly negative, a silver lining surfaced: Since I would often wake up mid-REM cycle, I started having almost total recall of my dreams and formed a habit to write them down.
While toying around with Custom GPTs, I came across "Dream Decoder", a GPT that draws upon psychology and symbolism to help analyze dreams. At first, I thought the GPT was fun to toy around with, but I never thought that dream analysis would become one of my favorite generative AI use cases. I could not have been more wrong.
While the Dream Decoder GPT does a decent job analyzing the dreams without context, I estimate that using that approach, I only gleaned new insights ~25% of the time. Here, I define a "new insight" as any realization I made about my emotions, inner state, or patterns of behavior as a result of AI dream analysis that I did not first make on my own.
After a few weeks, I realized that providing personal context improves performance significantly. Currently, when using AI for dream analysis, I glean new insights about my subconscious state closer to ~60% of the time.
My approach is something like:
- Dump the dream into the Dream Decoder GPT
- Read the analysis
- Ask ChatGPT proper -- Custom GPTs don't have memory at the time of writing -- for a short paragraph summarizing my life context from the past month, including opportunities and struggles across all areas: business, family, relationships, and personal
- Copy that context over to the Dream Decoder GPT
- Read the updated analysis
- If I wish to explore one part of the dream more deeply (usually a function of dream length), iterate with Dream Decoder GPT, providing more context as required
Without getting too personal, in the past two weeks alone, I have gained insight into:
- How I can approach boundary setting differently to better protect myself in my relationships
- Why my subconscious is wrestling with my career
- Which specific career challenges I have to overcome to live more peacefully
- Which values my ex and I were misaligned on and why
- Which social environments I should consciously avoid as I move through a period of my life that is defined by rapid change
I also discovered:
- 2-3 undesirable behavioral patterns conditioned in me by my parents
- The artist in me that I have neglected in putting music (piano) on pause in 2023-24
If you liked this, please share it! In the future, I expect that technologies will help us better harvest insights from our dreams so that we can live happier, more fulfilling lives. For the moment, the approach detailed here has served me quite well, and I think it will serve you, too.
Happy Dreaming!