As a kid, I feel like I had a really overactive imagination and I remember having lots of dreams. Nightmares, specifically, that woke me out of sleep. I’m not much of a dreamer as an adult. Maybe I have them but don’t remember them in the morning?! I feel like I probably don’t remember my dreams on account of being overworked, tired, and having my to-do list looping in my brain constantly (secret is: it never ends!).
So this assignment of tracking my dreams was kind of hard for me. I would tell myself before falling asleep “now Priyanka, you better dream of something good and remember it in the morning!” and I would wake up stressed and upset that I had no dreams. This repeated for a couple of nights until I finally got something. I jotted down the following “dreams” in my notes app:
…hm yikes! Pretty terrifying, these must be stress dreams! Since midterms took over my life last week, these “dreams” were from a couple of weeks ago, so I don’t really know what they were/felt like anymore… but reading them back, they seem mostly bad. I think the intentionality lead to me to finally harnessing my dreams. I should practice this more when things feel a little bit more peaceful in my life.
I am not really familiar with writing prompts for AI systems, I don’t really like AI art in general, but I’m going to use Dall-E2, “an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language”, to try to illustrate some of my dreams. Below are some of the images that I feel like came may have come closest to the dream itself and the image prompts.
“rollerskating on a crowded beach”
“rollerskating really fast on a crowded beach”
“rollerskating on a crowded beach”
“rollerskating really fast on a crowded beach”
“one person rollerskating really fast on a crowded beach with people relaxing on the beach, during sunset”
“dystopia, desert, lightning, sandstorm, futuristic buildings and airplane”
“dystopia, desert, lightning, sandstorm, desolate, futuristic buildings up close and parked futuristic airplane”
“dystopia, desert, lightning, sandstorm, desolate, futuristic and very tall buildings up close and parked futuristic airplane”
“snow in the sonoran desert”
“vast sonoran landscape, with freshly fallen snow, at sunrise”
“vast sonoran landscape, many cactus, saguaro, with freshly fallen snow, at sunrise”
The effect of these images is so weird, totally uncanny. Like other than the images for the second prompt, the generated images look like there could be something real about them, but when you look closely, the pixels do strange things. They feel kind like a bunch of images stitched together in Photoshop. And on top of the AI-effect, the prompts (my dreams) were kinda generated by my own AI-system in my brain. So double-strange!