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Why do we have dreams? What are these flashes of ideas, seemingly disconnected visions of the past, present, and future. Some people believe that dreams are merely random bits from memory, flashed in our mind's eye during sleep. Other people ascribe great meaning and predictions based upon our dreams. Being a computer scientist, I ascribe to another idea.

One problem that can occur during a simulation is stagnation. A simulated being can get into a rut, always making the same decisions, the same mistakes. There are ways of moderating this effect, to shake things up as it were. Consider one way of representing our beliefs, our thoughts, everything we know about. Imagine that at the end of each waking day we have a sorted list of all of the actions and major concepts that we encountered that day. Chronology is a good primary index as we are generally aware of the relative order of events. However, certain events in the course of the day are stronger than others. For example, a particularly heated argument with your partner would stand out more than, say, brushing your teeth. Therefore, a second ordering might be the frequency of which certain keywords, or pairing of keywords appear during the day.

Okay, so each memory is represented as a set of links between keywords. One memory might link "partner", "argument", and "money." Another memory might be "car", "repair", and "money." We might have a large set of these memory lists at the end of the day, ordered by their perceived order, ranked by how much time we spent thinking about them, and the memories could also exist in some sort of hierarchy, but lets keep it simple for now.

So, at the end of the day, when we rest our pretty little heads, the highly ranked data gets written to long-term memory. However, I'm not saying that dreams are merely the back-up process of short-term to long-term data. No, I think they are more than the mere result of some dumb filing operation. I've had feature length dreams, dreams that feel like they last for hours, for days, complete with credits! These aren't the works of brief visions of the days events. However, parts of my days do play a part in the dreams.

One very old dream I recall is Godzilla smashing into my backyard and crushing my swimming pool. Now where did that dream come from? Well, I have memories of seeing Godzilla on a commercial, and lots of memories of my swimming pool. So, somehow a pseudo-random connection was created between those two concepts. It was as if my subconscious was scrolling through the keywords in the days events and picked "swimming pool" and then from somewhere in memory picked "godzilla." However, neither keyword necessarily registered high on my daily use, and yet they did appear together. And why didn't my dream include visions of Godzilla crushing a Japanese city, which would have been far more reflective of what I'd seen on tv. Well, I'm afraid it doesn't work that way, or at least not always. Perhaps I didn't have a strong enough link in my mind between Godzilla and a Japanese city. I have lots of memories of Godzilla crushing things though. And yet, why does our memory do this? Okay, so our memory creates somewhat random links between memories. We started with a memory including me, "swimming pool", and "backyard", and a memory of "Godzilla","crushing", and "Japan." From that we got Godzilla crushing the swimming pool in my backyard while I watched. ("Godzilla", "crushing", "swimming pool", "me") Why didn't my mind choose Godzilla crushing me? or even better, Godzilla crushing my school?

Well, perhaps there is some sort of semantic or syntactic filter in practice. Some links between keywords might be invalid, or might not evoke some decision or action. The fabricated dream memory must evoke a strong enough chain reaction to be remembered. If your mind says to you "Godzilla is crushing a ream of paper," you'd say "Who gives a crap?" But if your mind says to you "Godzilla is crushing that building you built with your bare hands, your whole life's work!" then you'd be devastated, and the image would evoke a strong, salient emotion. A strong enough response will trigger other memories, predictions, responses, and so forth. If the sequence gets critical mass of interest, then it could turn into an all-night feature length dream. But of course, this begs the question, what point does all this have?

Well, the key thing is that the fabricated dream memory was run through the mind for a decision, as if it were any other input we'd be receiving that day. The experience of Godzilla crushing the swimming pool in my backyard was fed to a preprocessor which dutifully rendered the image of a monster numerous stories stall planting his foot square in the oval swimming pool, water gushing everywhere, and a big footprint left in his wake. All of that is simple extrapolation of what the event might entail. Most people are good at visualizing things, predicting cause and effect, though like my brother Roger, we may choose to often ignore it.

One other thing humans are quite good at is making a decision. Even choosing no action is still making a decision. And so, when that image of Godzilla was presented to my minds eye, my decision functions sprang to life and made the appropriate decisions as if I had actually experienced seeing Godzilla in real life. I think the recommended actions involved either cowering in fear or running for my life. There may have been some anger in that my sister and I had both contributed $1500 from our college funds to pay for the damn pool, and here some giant slimy lizard from Japan was crushing it. Where's FEMA when you need them?

Okay, so our mind created random links between keywords, strung them together into a semantically correct scenario, fed it to our mind's eye, and had us make decisions based upon that. Who cares? What is the freaking point?

Well, as mentioned in the beginning, one problem in a simulation is to make sure our agents don't get into a rut. It'd be nice if they were always coming up with ideas, being prepared to deal with events they never encountered before. Highly creative individuals are prized in our society in many different levels. Entrepreneurs, artists, strategists--they all are highly creative people, connecting disparate and common ideas to build greater concepts. Perhaps one man dreamed of industrial metal springs and children, and came up with the slinky. Another man may have been working all day making light filaments, and while dreaming came up with a new combination to try the next day. While our daily mind may be repressed by societal pressures, religions, and responsibilities, our dreams are much less so restrained. Dreams can create connections that, if they evoke a strong enough emotion, will be remembered to our waking day. Even if the dream is not remembered, there may still be a residual subtle link between the keywords in the dream in our memory. Perhaps during the day, when we recall one of the keywords, the other keywords popup.

And therein lies the value. Dreams create new linkages in our memory, ones we wouldn't make while awake. Our egos and much of our societal identity turns off when we sleep, and our mind is free to go about making associations, and asking us questions--How would you react? What if this happened to you?

It is often said, when we're dealing with a particularly onerous decision or problem, that we should "sleep on it." Perhaps our mind is at work on the problem for us when we sleep. Perhaps when we dream we have some greater psychic ability and steal ideas from other dreamers. Ah, now that's an interesting though, maybe I'll dream on it and get back to you.