The Artificial Intelligence of Dreams

The Artificial Intelligence of Dreams Duane Rousselle (bio) Dreams: insularity, continuity, and disjuncture When I delivered my first lecture on psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence, I opened with an equivocation: I thanked the audience for “being-here,” which was a forced equivocation, a homophony, with “being-hear.” When the phrase is said aloud it demonstrates how an equivocation can accommodate a resonance through speech (although not the written word), whose sounds permit something to shift outside of its dwelling place, language. In other words, the equivocation opens us up to an enjoyment that exists outside of the domain of what philosophers have called “being.” I offered another equivocation, but of a different order: “the interpretation of dreams.” It was the title of a well-known book which was written by Sigmund Freud and published in 1899. The title permits an alternative reading: the interpretation of dreams. On the one hand, it implies that interpretation involves deciphering latent dream thoughts from manifest dream statements. On the other hand, the interpretation of dreams implies that the dream is its own interpretation, since it proceeds according to condensation and displacement, or, put in linguistic terms, metaphor and metonymy (see Miller, “Interpretation in Reverse”). Freud’s notion [End Page 161] of “dream censorship” described a device for prolonging dream satisfactions by sheltering them from the unsatisfactory experience of waking up. Freud’s famous thesis: dreams are expressions of wish-fulfilment, and they permit satisfactions to pass that would have been unavailable to us during waking life. Put simply, censorship is the security of an interpretation which strives toward infinite satisfaction. Psychoanalysis is not a meta-language (Lacan, L’insu que sait … np). When psychoanalytic interpretation aims at deciphering latent meaning, it elevates itself above those interpretations already occurring within the dream-work. In other words, it renders redundant unconscious fabrications by prolonging their interpretive satisfactions without repression. To decipher the unconscious is also to perpetuate satisfactions by permitting their subsistence during waking life. This is no doubt why Freud proposed another mode of interpretation in a seldom acknowledged footnote: Now, when the analysts have at least become reconciled to substituting the manifest dream for its [latent] meaning as found by interpretation, many of them are guilty of another mistake, to which they adhere just as stubbornly. They look for the essence of the dream in this latent content, and thereby overlook the distinction between latent dream-thoughts and dream-work. The dream is fundamentally nothing more than a unique form of our thinking […]. It is the dream-work which produces this form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming—the only explanation of its singularity. (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams np) This quotation supports the hypothesis that Freud isolated a disjuncture of latent content and dream-work, thereby foregrounding another layer of the dream-work, which means another layer of the unconscious. On the one side, there are poetic effects akin to the narrative arts, and, on the other side, there is the singularity of the dream-work which, according to Jacques Lacan, may be approached through topology. Therefore, dreams are not reducible to fictions, which explains why Lacan moved from linguistics to topology, from the signifier toward the Mobius strip (whose properties include boundary or edge, continuity of surface, and hole) (see Ragland, Lacan 4–8). In an exemplary dream, discussed by Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams np), a father witnessed his son standing in front of him exclaiming, “Father, don’t you see that I’m burning?” In reality, the boy was deceased, and his body, surrounded by tall burning candles, was resting in an adjacent room. The father woke up to discover that his son’s body was burned by one of [End Page 162] the flames. The dream intends to persist against a burdensome reality. In this case, the flickering of candlelight entered the dream-world through the father’s perceptual-consciousness system, and then it was translated directly into dream satisfactions. On the one hand, we can say that there is the insulation of the dream-world from an unsatisfactory reality, waking life, and, on the other hand, there is the persistence or continuity of dream satisfactions. Two...

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