AI and dream therapy.
I heard someone recently talking about their clever phone. I wasn’t sure if they meant to say smart phone and got the word wrong, or whether they were joking. Smart, clever, what’s the difference?
A quick Google gives one definition of smart as “Having or showing a quick-witted intelligence”, whereas clever is defined as “Quick to understand, learn, and devise or apply ideas”.
I can’t think of a single example of my phone demonstrating quick-witted intelligence, although I haven’t tried using it to ask ChatGPT to entertain me with intelligent quick wit. I wonder how it would fare with that.
In a dream last week, my phone had a new 3D-printer feature. Just to show off, it spat out a Hallmark card of a cute puppy dog, wrapped in cellophane: the card, not the dog. Too cute. Not as in ‘incredibly cute’ but as in ‘overly cute’. I chuckled in the dream and laid the card to one side. It wasn’t what I was trying to achieve with my phone. I was trying to record a video of a family member being delightfully and naturally playful.
But my dream phone wasn’t cooperating. I looked at the screen. A message popped up: ‘Insert a new roll of film’, it said.
I woke up.
I’d like to think I can be quick-witted and playful, in life and in work. But not Hallmark cute. Let me put this in context: in my work as a dream analyst and dream therapist, I sometimes find it helpful to guide clients through serious waters using playful language. It helps clients to shift perspective with more ease, to find light. Dreams can surprise and delight us with their playfulness, their puns, their symbols, their wordplay, and their metaphors, so it’s easier to engage with the dreaming mind (or the client’s unconscious mind) using a similar approach. Even the darkest of dreams ultimately yield insight and light, and it’s helpful to follow the serious work of surfacing deep emotions and patterns by playfully encouraging a clearer and lighter way forward.
In my line of business, it could be very tempting to offer cute Hallmark dream interpretations: puppy-cute dream messages all wrapped up in shiny cellophane. Messages that uplift for a day but that have no substance. That’s not what I do.
The internet offers plenty of places you can go if you want a low-substance Hallmark dream interpretation. And then there’s AI.
AI is as intelligent as its programming. Perhaps not smart (although that may change in the future). Arguably clever. Capable of offering a mix of sound and not so sound information.
I’ve no doubt that my podcasts (The Dream Show with Jane Teresa Anderson) have been fed into AI. And my blogs. I have no issue with that. I have worked hard to create freely accessible information about dreams and dreaming, and if AI can help further distribute these resources, it is helping me to achieve my vision of educating people worldwide about dreams.
There are plenty of other valuable websites, blogs, and podcasts about dreams that can contribute to AI’s knowledge base, but there is also an abundance of misinformed and misleading material about dreams that, I imagine, may also have been fed into AI. It worries me that if you ask AI to interpret a dream, it will offer a mishmash of possibilities rather than precise insight into your unique personal dream.
An AI interpretation might give you some good starting points, or it might lead you down the wrong track. A consultation with a professional dream analyst or dream therapist will offer you more than starting points. It will see what AI can’t see and walk with you as only a person can, until every element of your unique and highly personal dream has offered up its treasures.
My dream phone needed a ‘new roll of film’. I knew this to mean a roll of film for a film camera. Pre-digital, pre-AI days. That new roll of film was a gentle reminder to step back from concerns about AI dream interpretation and focus on the value of non-digital human approaches. Good, old-fashioned human connection with our clients and their uniquely personal dreams.
I teach the art and science of working with dreams: tools, techniques, and a level of intuition smarts that our current AI models have not yet evolved. Oh, and as far as I know, AI has not infiltrated my course materials at The Dream Academy. That would be unethical.
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