Weird Dreams Train Our Brains to Be Better Learners (nautil.us)

That is so fascinating. I know a few people that have said their dreams have become stranger over the pandemic and the idea it’s because there’s less stimuli and the brain is trying to avoid overfitting like a neural network is so damn cool.

I’ve gotten in the habit of analyzing my dreams soon as I wake up. One thing I noticed is your brain uses doppelgängers to convey things. If you see a person that has no business being in your mind all of a sudden, understand that’s the closest doppelgänger your brain found during the dream to represent something it’s trying to make sense of that happened recently (eg you see a classmate from childhood, but it really represents a coworker). Once you start realizing that, you can see what your subconscious is digesting as of late.

I’ve also experienced an extremely traumatic accident, and my dreams replay it regularly via doppelgängers. If it was a crazy train derailment that happened in real life, you’ll consistently see dreams where you are moving insanely fast (on top of a wave, on a rollercoaster, etc, it’s replaying the speed at which the train was moving).

Pretty nuts, I take it seriously now days. It all sounds goofy, but if you put the pieces together, you can see just how impacted you really were by all of it.

I do always tend to write up some of my dreams, especially if they're quite bizarre. Sometimes, I do tend to search for their symbols.