When Dreams Leak Into Reality

Where do thoughts go when they die? They end up in our dreams, where they randomly mix with other thoughts, people, places and objects and become actors in bizarre, almost surreal situations. At best, our dreams are the equivalent of “AI slop”: an opportunity for our brain to hallucinate in the safe space of deep sleep.

Scientists still have no fucking clue what dreams are, and why they exist. Some argue it is “back-office work” that our memory does while the brain rests, as it sorts through its information inventory. Others yet, claim there is an actual psychological purpose: the emotional processing of fears, traumas etc. Indeed, in most of my dreams I am either abducted by mafia gangs or made redundant from an imaginary career, but I wouldn’t call that processing, rather some form of PTSD giving me nightmares.

When our brain hallucinates, the consequences never reach into the real world. Most of us wake up without even remembering our dream, and there is probably a reason for that: it would be dangerous, but also pointless, to try and analyze most of our dreams. As soon as we enter the real world, our memory presses the “clear dream cache” button. It would appear that dreams are only stored in our temporary hard drive, then wiped off. Thank goodness.

But it is a different situation when an AI hallucinates. The consequences are real and tangible, and incredibly dangerous. As the absurd, fantastical world of hallucinating language models begins to interact with humans living in the physical world, we are all at risk of living inside our worst nightmares, this time, for real.

7 years ago, I wrote an essay called “The Dream Humanity Is Unable To Wake Up From”. It was a strange essay which found unlikely resonance in various communities, earned me a few podcast invitations, and ended up in one of my books. My main argument was that our own brain can become incredibly dangerous when it starts creating its own realities, its own “slop”. Many of us become walking zombies as the fake and fantastical worlds of gaming, brand propaganda, religion and political indoctrination begin to dictate our real life.

But now, we also have AIs that do it for us. Hallucination is becoming supercharged and integrated into our waking world. Reality has never been under this much threat: eyewitnesses are laughed at, news are AI-engineered, and genocides are reframed as self-defence. The slop is not simply leaking out into the real world: it is beginning to dictate reality. As it gathers more self-awareness, its hallucinations become weapons of mass distraction.

We are beginning to inhabit a hallucinogenic world where elements of the bizarre, absurd, and utterly horrific, are spreading into the real world like viral infections. If Hitler is dancing with David Bowie and Elvis releases a brand new album, then reality is officially dead. I recently wrote that “the collapse of civilisations was always preceded by the collapse of reality”, and I stand by it. Because once reality has collapsed, it is pointless to even try and find the erase button. The slop has gobbled it up already.

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