Can ChatGPT really analyse your dreams? – Dazed
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Kate Solomon was eating dinner with a couple of friends in her flat when the man came bursting in, desperately asking her to call an ambulance. An indie popstar had been critically injured in the flat above. It transpired that he had been shot in a politically-motivated attack by a guerilla army. Then, like every straight-to-the-back-of-Netflix thriller, she woke up.
Thankfully, Solomon had ChatGPT to make sense of it all. Dreaming of communal dining represented her need for emotional nourishment, it said. The intruder represented a crisis in life. The popstar symbolised anxiety surrounding a threat to creativity. The armed resistance group signified a broader ideological struggle.
Solomon isn’t alone when it comes to using the AI bot to decipher her dreams. In fact, she got the idea from a friend. “I’m not sure who patient zero was,” she jokes. Like many others, she began using ChatGPT for advice and guidance during a time of emotional turmoil. “There was lots of big life upheaval and intense new friendships. I think I was dreaming quite a lot and quite vividly at the time, and had started making a note of them because they had become increasingly unhinged in a silly and fun way.”
Speaking to a professional is obviously better, but how many people can you message at 3am to interpret a dream you just had?
Today, with a quick prompt, ChatGPT can assume the role of a psychotherapist in seconds, without years of training or the need to Monzo Flex a fancy chaise-longue. Over the last few years, ChatGPT has entered the whole gamut of our waking lives. Every single day, over 120 million across the world use it to write essays, shopping lists, eulogies. And, as it becomes more intelligent, its therapeutic role for young people is becoming more pronounced, filling in for expensive professionals during a global mental health crisis.
At the same time, we’ve witnessed mounting interest in dreams more generally: from the rise of lucid dreaming to madcap dream tech (Dream Recorder, wildly, generates a video of your dreams) it’s one of the final frontiers of human experience waiting to be excavated. No surprise, then, that many of us are turning to AI to make sense of our dream lives: on Reddit, hundreds of other people like Solomon have shared their experiences using ChatGPT to make sense of their subconscious. “I first saw people writing about using AI for dream analysis on different online platforms in the beginning of 2023 when ChatGPT became really popular. Some wrote about using it like a personal therapist or for dream interpretation,” says Paolo Raile, a programmer and psychotherapist at Sigmund Freud University.
Since then, ChatGPT integrations like Dream Decoder and Dream Interpretation have emerged, using a labyrinthine combination of Freudian psychology and neurocognitive insights to try to review the cinema of our unconscious. The majority of them are based on Carl Jung’s work: the Swiss psychiatrist believed that dreams revealed the “shadow” – the hidden, repressed part of our selves – in various forms and that exploring these signs would illuminate the dark side of our mind.
“I was already using ChatGPT for work, so when I kept having these recurring dreams about train stations, it felt natural to try it there too,” says Ivory Pijn. “I wanted to see how my subconscious might be interpreted. I used to search Google for that kind of thing, but it feels harder now, entries are more biased, while ChatGPT at least engages directly with what I give it.”
I love using chatgpt as my dream journal because my dreams were always very vivid and chatgpt always successfully interprets the symbolisms that make sense. the more dreams I input, the more realistic the symbolisms get
Artist Aoife Dunne, meanwhile, was inspired to turn to ChatGPT to analyse her dreams as someone who regularly experiments with fusing art and tech. “In my work I often bring technology into intimate or irrational spaces, so it felt natural to test it against my subconscious,” she explains. “I’ve always had intense, surreal dreams. For years I wrote them down the moment I woke up. Over the past year, I started running them through ChatGPT with my morning coffee, and it’s become a ritual.”
But is ChatGPT actually any good at cosplaying Jung? It’s worth noting that dream interpretation might be a fruitless task to begin with; while some neuroscientists still subscribe to dreams representing our emotional states, others believe they are entirely random. But, if we assume that dreams do hold some sort of deeper meaning, it’s clearly more advanced than a dog-eared dream dictionary.
Pijn remembers one standout positive experience. “One dream that stood out was one where I was directing a film. Someone on set was causing chaos, and when I tried to fire them, my producer told me it was her daughter,” she recalls. “ChatGPT said it was my shadow that this unruly part of me is a product of my deeper emotional life; it’s not something I can just get rid of, but something I may need to reckon with.” She continues: “I liked the Jungian take. It feels like ChatGPT is sorting through countless fragments of other people’s experiences, then filtering them through the specifics of mine.”
She also believes that the distance from patient and therapist is beneficial. “The fact it doesn’t really know you is somewhat freeing. You can be anyone online,” she says. “ChatGPT might guess you have issues with your parental life, but it doesn’t need to know the details that could influence its response. Speaking to a professional is obviously better, but how many people can you message at 3am to interpret a dream you just had?” It’s also possible that ChatGPT can find indiosyncratic links and patterns that a human might not. “What I like most is how it links things I’d never connect, pulling a thread from a dream months ago into something I dreamt last night,” Dunne says. “I’ve always seen dreams as places where logic collapses. Passing that through a machine built on strict logic creates an interesting collision.”
But this void in knowledge is also a potential pitfall. Arguably, ChatGPT can’t truly understand us. ChatGPT doesn’t (currently) dream itself. While debates have been raging this week about the rise of AI consciousness, it certainly doesn’t have an unconscious right now and can’t really empathise when it comes to dreams. More importantly, though, it doesn’t know enough of our individual unconscious to attach any symbols to events in our personal lives. “There is the missing context of body language, voice tone and facial expressions. For real dream analysis, you need biographical context,” says Raile. He also notes that while new large language models (LLMs) are attempting to ask more questions to glean background information, they still rely on a lot of guesswork.
The fact it doesn‘t really know you is somewhat freeing. You can be anyone online
“Don’t get me wrong, reading about yourself and what your subconscious might be up to is always a good time, but I didn’t find the dream analyses particularly enlightening or useful,” Solomon says. She thinks it was spitting out generic symbolism, regurgitated from trawling the web. “I found it kind of boringly formulaic. Like it was just quoting from a dream dictionary about each element, rather than giving me an overarching interpretation.”
Are there any risks that come with using ChatGPT as a dream doctor? “The safety aspect is interesting, because you are feeding an LLM a key to your unconscious and I guess something nefarious could be done with that,” Solomon says. She’s not too anxious, though. “Ultimately it doesn’t matter to me that much: I’d have told these dreams to my friends, a vague acquaintance, a stranger at a party.” Raile emphasises the importance of AI literacy. “The risk is always when someone trusts the AI blindly. With your own psyche, this risk is much more serious than a wrong historical fact.”
Taken with a generous pinch of salt, using ChatGPT to analyse your dreams is probably fine. “I see it as the same sort of thing as doing those personality tests in magazines: fun, silly, potentially a little revealing but not giving you outcomes you should base any major life decisions around,” Solomon says.
“People are suspicious of letting something so non-human into a personal space. But I like the discomfort; it forces something new,” Dunne adds. “Let‘s see what happens when you let the machine into places it doesn’t belong.” She explains that while ChatGPT’s analysis can be “inconsistent”, that’s where the appeal lies. “What’s interesting is how it rearranges fragments I’d never assemble on my own. Even when it’s ‘wrong,’ it gets me thinking. I’m less interested in accuracy and more in what happens when human fragments get reassembled by the machine.”
