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The Uses of AI for Interpreting Dreams

New evidence points to the potential benefits of AI dream interpretation.

A recent study by Mark Blagrove and colleagues at Swansea University in the UK found that an AI system provided dream interpretations that participants rated “as moderately accurate and as enabling some personal insight.” (105) The participants gave answers to the Gains from Dream Interpretation (GDI) questionnaire that were then compared to answers from participants in previous studies of dream interpretation in live therapy and groups. Using the ChatGPT system, the participants in this study rated the interpretations lower on the “exploration-insight” subscale, which considers the levels of waking life relevance highlighted by the interpretation. Nevertheless, Blagrove et al. observe that “the mean rating of GDI item 1 (‘My dream has been explored thoroughly by the ChatGPT interpretation’) was 7.90 on the 1-9 scale, indicating that participants saw the process as very thorough.” (111)

This study offers an early piece of evidence to support the development of more finely calibrated AI tools for interpreting dreams. First, however, several concerns and limits must be addressed.

What’s Missing from AI Dream Interpretation

Blagrove and his colleagues noted the limits of their study in its minimalist input/output process, with participants simply entering their dream (plus waking life details and associations) and receiving an AI response. There was none of the kind of extended dialogue and exploration that typically occurs in live modes of dream interpretation. But even if this process could be extended with a series of interactive responses between the dreamer and the AI system, more fundamental aspects of dream interpretation would still be excluded. In a thoughtful commentary on Blagrove et al.’s article, Leslie Ellis points out that,

“A dream group or a therapy session does much more than produce a correct interpretation. The real work happens in staying with an image long enough for the body to respond, in hearing how a phrase lands in someone else’s ear, in noticing what shifts when an emotion is named out loud. It depends on a back-and-forth that includes silence, breath, and the small adjustments people make when something feels true.”

These qualities of embodied presence and empathetic sensitivity highlighted by Ellis seem beyond the range of even the most optimistic visions of AI.

To this, I would add that a vital element in the best, most dynamic forms of live dream interpretation is a willingness, even an eagerness, to say and openly engage with hard truths, critical insights, and taboo subjects. Current AI models like ChatGPT, however, are constrained by a variety of internal and, to the public, invisible boundaries around controversial topics, which means efforts to use these systems to interpret the full range of human oneiric experience may be impossible with dreams involving certain types of content (e.g., sexual, racial/ethnic, political) and may in general lead to a subtle homogenizing of all AI interpretations. Precisely where dreams become most dramatic and interesting, current AI systems are forbidden from responding.

Where AI Dream Interpretation Can Go From Here

Several new possibilities beckon for research on this topic, along with new potentials for applying these insights in practical contexts of therapy, education, and public welfare. The greatest progress will likely come from projects that pursue the following paths:

  1. Experimenting with AI systems other than ChatGPT, systems that have been trained with higher ethical standards and are more tailored to the purposes of dream interpretation. More and more of these systems are currently available, and some of them may offer better resources for interpreting dreams. Ultimately, the best systems will be built on a foundation of focused, systematic training with large collections of high-quality dream data.
  2. Developing more detailed and nuanced prompts for the AI systems, beyond simply asking them “What does this dream mean?” or “What is a Freudian interpretation of this dream?” Writing fruitful prompts for AI systems is an emerging 21st century art form, a kind of linguistic neo-wizardry that can make a huge differential impact on the results of research in this realm.
  3. Widening the interpretive lens. As with live dream groups, where the value is hearing a variety of people’s perspectives, AI systems can also provide a broad range of possible interpretations. For instance, the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app, which I help to administer, currently offers ten different interpretation modes, from Jungian and Lacanian to Biblical and Astrological. Giving people access to a multiplicity of views can empower them to trust their own judgment and discern their own best understanding of their dream given the various possibilities. It might even spark a new interest in learning more from actual people who are experts in these approaches.
  4. Distinguishing between the circumstances in which people can benefit from live therapy and group dream interpretations, and those in which they can benefit from AI interpretation. For instance, a particularly rich and memorable dream, what Jung would call a “big dream,” would surely benefit from the deep, extended exploration of a live interpretation in therapy or a group. For other dreams, which may not merit the time or effort of a live interpretation but still contain valid and meaningful insights, an AI interpretation system might offer a useful approach.

Caution is certainly warranted in this area, but so is a sense of reasonable hope. At their best, AI systems offer radically expanded access to a growing variety of high-quality methods of dream interpretation. This should be a cause for optimism among those who believe in the benefits of greater public awareness of dreaming. Rather than replacing therapists or groups, AI dream interpretation tools can enhance their efforts, connect them to new resources, and point them in directions of deeper meaning that ultimately only humans can pursue.

 

Note: this first appeared in Psychology Today on May 27, 2026.

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When You Know Too Much About Dreams

What if you know more about the meanings of another person’s dreams than they know?

What should you do when a friend shares a dream with you, and you immediately see vital meanings in the dream that your friend doesn’t seem to see? If you are someone who is a naturally insightful dreamer and/or has studied methods of dream interpretation, you may suddenly find yourself in these awkward positions of unequal knowledge and awareness. What’s your best approach in responding?

Let’s call the dreamer your friend, whether it’s a friend, a family member, a slight acquaintance, or even a stranger. In this moment of talking about dreams, this person is your friend.

So, your friend shares a dream with you, and right away you get a strong sense of what the dream is about. You also realize this is very sensitive personal territory. What do you do?

First and foremost, don’t avoid or ignore it. Say something in response, simply to let your friend know you’re present and giving them your full attention. Whether they know it consciously or not, your friend has just shared an important truth about themselves and their experience of life and the world. You can honor that truth and show your friend immediate respect with a few encouraging words—

“Wow, that’s amazing…”

“That’s so weird…”

“That sounds incredibly scary…”

“What an intense experience…”

After that, what else might you say? Maybe nothing. Maybe you’ve said enough already.

Your friend may never have told anyone this dream. Indeed, they may never have talked about their dreams in any social setting. That’s why it is good to let you friend know how much you appreciate their willingness to trust you with this glimpse into their inner world.

“Thanks for sharing that…”

“I’m really glad you told me…”

Perhaps your friend does actually recognize the deep meaning you see so clearly in the dream, and no more needs to be said. You helped your friend just by listening, and that is all you have been asked to do.

If your friend seems open to further comments, go ahead, but always remember that you could be wrong. No matter how clear and obvious the meaning of the dream might seem to you, the fact always remains that you could be incorrect about its relevance to the dreamer. This is one good reason to proceed with humility and use a cautionary preface, something like “if it were my dream,…” when offering your friend comments and possible interpretations.

“If it were my dream, I’d be scared about losing control of a situation…”

“If I had a dream like that, the house might symbolize…”

“If I dreamed about tumbling cats, I would see them as…”

To the extent you may be right about the deeper meaning of the dream, it’s best to express your insight in terms of curiosity and wonder, suggesting to your friend the ways in which their dream offers a potential opening to new discoveries. Rather than stating what the dream means, as if you are an oracle from on high, you give your friend a sense of the dream as their own special opening to mind-enhancing possibilities.

“If it were my dream, I’d wonder if …”

“If I had a dream like that, I’d be curious about…”

“If I could go back in the dream, I’d look around and explore…”

A variation in the discussion could be to compare your insight about the dream to a similar theme in a cultural form, like a movie or tv show:

“That reminds me of the ending of Game of Thrones, when…”

The downside of making a cultural reference is leading your friend away from the dream itself. But this is the potential upside, too. Temporarily moving away from the dream can help your friend continue thinking about the deeper issues but without such a direct spotlight on the personal content.

Keep in mind that your friend may have unconsciously been seeking a way to share this dream and bring it into the world, even if consciously they don’t understand it. They chose you to share it with, probably because they sensed (accurately) that you are one of the rare people who can help with strange or difficult dreams. In this sense, you function in these conversations as a kind of oneiric midwife. You help bring a new being into the world, namely your friend’s heightened awareness of their dream, now a living part of their waking consciousness.

 

Note: this first appeared in Psychology Today, February 3, 2026.

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Dreaming and Technologies of the Sacred

This is the written version of the presentation (with a 7-minute time limit) I made on Sunday, January 11, to the attendees of the Dream x Engineering Symposium at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thanks to Adam Horowitz, Michelle Carr, Karen Konkoly, and all the others who organized and participated in the symposium.

Dreaming and Technologies of the Sacred

Thank you, it’s an honor to be here.

I’d like to share with you a working hypothesis, drawn from the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, that I believe has practical importance for dream engineering:

Any dream technology will be more effective the more sacred, and the less profane, the experiential context in which it is deployed.

Here is a quote from his 1959 book:

The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane… The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are heirophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere… The sacred is saturated with being.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane (1959), 12

I can gloss this passage by saying:

The sacred is conceived as a break into ordinary time and space, a rupture in the monotony and homogeneity of profane existence.

The sacred brings us closer to the really real, the time of origins, the center of the cosmos.

Without having more time to elaborate on this concept in the abstract, let me offer two sources of empirical evidence in favor of my working hypothesis.

First are the religious rituals of dream incubation practiced throughout history, in cultures all over the world, all of which share the goal of moving the dreamer away from the profane, and towards the sacred: by means of fasting, prayer, and purifications, and by means of sleeping in a special place, like a mountain, cave, or graveyard.

Dream incubation is the original form of dream engineering, and its guiding principle is maximizing the sacred qualities of the dreamer’s experience.

To be clear: It doesn’t matter if you believe it is an experientially sacred context, it matters if the dreamer believes it’s an experientially sacred context.

The second source of evidence is the “lab effect” that has bedeviled scientific sleep research from its earliest days.

I’ll share three comments that sleep lab researchers have made to me over the years:

  • Robert Van de Castle: after thousands of nights of sleep lab observations, he only heard of one reported wet dream.
  • Allan Hobson: he admitted the most interesting and intense types of dreams usually happen outside the lab.
  • Ernest Hartmann: he found that when chronic nightmare sufferers slept in his lab they had fewer nightmares, because they knew they were being observed all night and felt safer because of it.

From the perspective of Eliade and the working hypothesis I’m offering to you, the lab effect is a measure of how a profane setting can homogenize dreaming by diminishing its  range and intensity.

In closing, I will mention two new efforts to develop dream technologies that put the working hypothesis into practice.

First is the Elsewhere.to app for dream journaling, for which I serve as a research consultant and investor.

There is, of course, a profane quality to the cell phone for many people. But starting with its name, Elsewhere invites users to go beyond the profane space of the “this-here,” and to open themselves to another, more sacred way of perceiving and experiencing the world and their lives, through the prism of their dreams and the deep archetypal patterns that emerge when you track them over time.

The design, graphics, layout, features, image styles, and interpretation modes of Elsewhere have all been crafted by people who share this deep respect for the innate wisdom of the dreaming mind.

The second new effort represents a much older form of technology, a library, which I’m calling the Dream Library, nearly completed, intended as a long-term archive of books, journals, and art works related to dreaming.

Set in a rainforest, in a building of hand-crafted wood, the Dream Library will offer a permanent physical space for projects and gatherings devoted to the study of dreaming.

It is designed to be as non-profane as possible, and to elicit a tangible sense of the sacred potentials in everyone’s dreams.

And perhaps, one day, it will be the site of a future gathering of dream engineers.

Thank you.

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Why the Elsewhere Dream Journaling App Is the Best

As both a dreamer and a researcher, I find myself completely enchanted by the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app. Amazed. Smitten. Blown away. Impressed beyond all reckoning. And very excited about the future for dreamers all around the world. 

For the longest time, I wondered what it would take to create a dreamer’s playground: a private, safe, fun place to gather your dreams and freely explore them using a variety of high-quality tools and methods. It always seemed like an impossible fantasy… And now, Elsewhere has made that vision a reality by creating a garden of oneiric delights where you can play with your dreams, celebrate their multiplicities of meaning, and follow your curiosity wherever it leads. 

The Ethics of Online Dream Interpretation

Anything that has great potential for good also has great potential for harm. I would not be involved with Elsewhere were it not for its total commitment to an ethically minded approach, which I translate as simply doing your best to respect the dream and the dreamer. Treat the dream and the dreamer as ends, not means, as gifts to be honored rather than resources to be exploited. That’s the spirit that animates every aspect of the app’s design, from the back-end coding to the front-end user interface.

In practice, this underlies the policy that all information entered by Elsewhere users is privacy protected and will never be sold to a third-party. If for any reason you want your dreams back, you can have them, and all records of them will be removed from the app.

None of the tools or features within Elsewhere will tell you in a single, definitive way what your dreams mean. Instead, you are offered a variety of suggestions and possibilities from multiple perspectives.  Hopefully some of these interpretations will lead to helpful insights, but the ultimate authority is always held by you, the dreamer. Only the dreamer knows for sure what their dream means. 

New Features

Elsewhere is now available in more than 30 languages, which means these tools are potentially accessible to more than 99% of the human population. This bodes well for the future spread of dream awareness and education all around the world.

The primary function of the app, beyond recording and storing your dreams, is offering you a variety of tools to analyze their contents. These tools include ways to track the appearance of recurrent characters (e.g., parents, friends, celebrities), places (e.g., a beach, classroom, family home), and symbols (e.g., water, gun, mirror).

By recording your dreams on a regular basis, you build up an awareness of psychological rhythms that you may never have noticed within yourself before. You may also notice in reflecting on a long series of dreams that you can distinguish your unusual, highly memorable “big dreams” even more clearly, now that you have a better sense of the basic patterns underlying all your dreaming. 

Elsewhere users have become very creative in combining different features to enhance their dream journaling practice. In the past two years, the resources of artificial intelligence (AI) have been built into the app, providing what I now find are its two most stimulating features:

  • AI image generation: Elsewhere will create AI-generated images based on your dream and rendered in your chosen aesthetic style: Woodblock, Surreal Collage, Retro Camera, Storybook, Comic Book, Modern Illustration, Old Illustration, along with the option to write your own prompt. For me, this is the tool that yields the most surprising and intriguing results. The images are sometimes bizarrely different from my dreams, but even weird images can be thought-provoking if I look more closely at the image, not for what is missing but rather for what has been enhanced and highlighted beyond what I first noticed in the dream.
  • AI interpretations: Elsewhere also offers AI-generated interpretations of dreams in several different modes: Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, Biblical, relational, spiritual, Lacanian, and the Elsewhere house mode, “Shadow.” These interpretations do not substitute for sharing dreams with other people, but they can provide multiple perspectives quickly and easily, giving the dreamer valuable input to consider while reflecting on their dream. Some of the interpretations are obvious, and others are completely off-base, but here, too, I am frequently surprised by the system offering ideas and viewpoints I have not considered and appreciate being brought to my awareness. 

Natural Therapy

The phrase “natural therapy” comes from Robert Kegan’s classic work of developmental psychology, The Evolving Self (1982). In the final chapter of this book, Kegan talks about the simple, non-specialized resources in ordinary life that support our psychological welfare, resources he believes have naturally therapeutic effects even if they are not administered by mental health professionals. He urges us to study these resources more closely:

“Rather than make the practice of psychotherapy the touchstone for all considerations of help, look first into the meaning and makeup of those instances of unselfconscious ‘therapy’ as these occur again and again in nature…[and seek] an understanding of ‘natural therapy’–those relations and human contexts which spontaneously support people through the sometimes difficult process of growth and change.” (256)

Although Kegan does not directly mention dreams in this chapter, I believe that dreaming and dream-sharing have these exact qualities and benefits. There is a tremendous amount of evidence from history and anthropology supporting the connection between dreams and healing. This connection is natural in the sense of being universally accessible and emerging without conscious intention, and yet it is also culturally amplified in responding creatively to the shared symbolic world of the dreamer’s waking reality. 

 Now, with the help of the powerful tools available in Elsewhere, more people can explore this resource in greater depth than ever before. This will hopefully be of special value to people who may not need formal psychotherapy but can still benefit from gaining more awareness and insight into their unconscious fears, conflicts, and desires. 

To be clear, if you need for help from a mental health professional, you should seek it out right away. As a matter of policy, Elsewhere explicitly says it does not claim to provide the services of a psychotherapist. However, in line with Kegan’s thinking, I suggest that Elsewhere does contribute to a form of “natural therapy” by supporting and enhancing people’s access to the beneficial powers of their own dreams. As these potentials begin to emerge into realities, it is worth remembering that dreaming has huge advantages for promoting the collective mental health of large communities insofar as it is free, accessible to everyone, and highly personalized in its relevance to the lived experiences of each individual. 

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Here is an introductory post I wrote about Elsewhere two years ago:

The Elsewhere Dream Journaling App

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The Importance of Dreaming for Memory

It may seem hard to believe for those who rarely remember their dreams, but psychologists have found strong evidence that sleep and dreaming are closely intertwined with the dynamics of memory. Whether or not the dreams are consciously recalled in waking, the dreaming process seems to play a valuable role in the underlying system by which our memories are created, stored, and retrieved.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that different stages of sleep support different aspects of memory consolidation, and that sleep deprivation can severely disrupt learning, memory, and other cognitive functions. According to the “ontogenetic hypothesis” of Howard Roffwarg and colleagues, the high proportion of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in infancy and early childhood contributes to healthy brain development, which includes processing new experiences and building a foundation of primal memories. And new research by Deniz Kumral and colleagues has provided neuroscientific evidence to support the direct involvement of dreaming in the learning and memory formation process.

Dreaming of the Past

Even a brief look at the content of dreams confirms this close connection with memory. Dreams are often filled with vivid and realistically detailed images of past experiences with people, places, and activities, sometimes years or even decades later. Some past experiences, especially from childhood and adolescence, can recur in dreams throughout one’s life. These early memories become a kind of template for future dreaming, a filter through which dreams evaluate new experiences and weave them into our ongoing sense of self.  Sigmund Freud made it a cardinal principle of psychoanalytic interpretation to look for a dream’s roots in the dreamer’s memories of early childhood experiences and fantasies.

In addition to personal memories, dreams sometimes include references to family and cultural memories. Particularly in cases with traumatizing events in the communal past, the memories evoked in such dreams can be painful. However, these dreams may also provide an opportunity for generational witnessing, for keeping these sad historical truths alive in present-day awareness and documenting them for the benefit and understanding of those in the future.

Dream Journaling as a Practice of Memory

Keeping a dream journal makes it easier to remember previous dreams and track their patterns over time. Many people find it enjoyable, and even healing in a way, to review a long series of their dreams from the past and reflect on what has changed or evolved in their lives and what has remained stable and consistent. Especially in our later years, a dream journal becomes a kind of time machine that enables people to revisit the most meaningful moments and relationships from their distant past. It becomes possible in this process to discern the great arc of one’s life journey along what Carl Jung called the path of individuation, at the end of which we hopefully find a sense of wholeness and final actualization.

This is true even for those people who rarely remember their dreams. Dream recall tends to increase simply by means of an increased interest in and awareness of dreaming. In other words, the more dreams you want to remember, the more you probably will remember.

 

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, August 11, 2025.

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2025 Dream Animation Film Festival 3

The winner of this year’s “Audience Choice” award went to Daniel Rabanea for “Bends.”

Daniel described the dream that inspired his film as follows:

“I was alone on the beach. At first everything seemed calm until the sea started to look strange. A wave formed and grew bigger and bigger. My fear grew along with the dark and chaotic wave, and I thought there was no escape. But when the big wave finally hit me, something unexpected happened, the wave didn’t hit me, on the contrary, it gently caressed my face. And everything slowly calmed down. There I remained, alone on the beach, perplexed, amazed, transformed.”

And this is the process Daniel used to transform his dream into an animated film:

“I had this dream around 2010 and wrote it down in my ideas pad. Fifteen years later, the Instagram algorithm introduced me to the Dream Animation Festival. After reading the submission rules I quickly remembered my old dream and decided to make this animation. Turning the dream into animation was an adventure full of discoveries. I believed it would be a more obvious adaptation, but I discovery that dream and animation have their own particularities, the dream strongly marked by subjective sensations and the animation by objective images and sounds. During the immersive production process I was able to reflect even more on the meanings of my dream. The external, the sea that bends into waves, the chaotic nature of the universe, in connection with the internal, subjectivity, the mind building itself in bends, the dreamy nature of consciousness. The succession of events, the transformation, the devir, “you cannot step into the same river twice”.

For anyone who has experienced a dream of being menaced by an enormous tidal wave, “Bends” offers a surprising alternative to the way these dreams usually end. Daniel’s use of simple graphite drawings provides lots of space for the viewer’s imagination to fill in the subjective experience of confronting a tidal wave. For such a short film (90 seconds) it builds to a strong emotional peak and then resolves in a moment of magical transformation. No wonder the audience loved it!