Our Weird Dreams May Help Us Make Sense of Reality, AI-Inspired Theory Suggests

There you are, sitting front row of Miss Ryan's English class in your underwear, when in walks Chris Hemsworth holding a saxophone in one hand and a turtle in the other, asking you to play in his band. "Why not?" you say, taking the turtle before snapping awake in a cold sweat, the darkness pressing in as you whisper to yourself, "…WTF?" Decades – if not centuries – of psychological analysis have ventured to explain why it is our imaginations go on strange, unconstrained journeys while we sleep, with the general consensus being it has to do with processing experiences from our waking hours. That's all well and good, but seriously, do they have to be so … well, bizarre? Neuroscientist Erik Hoel from Tufts University has taken inspiration from the way we teach neural networks to recognize patterns, arguing the very experience of dreaming is its own purpose, and its weirdness might be a feature, not a bug.