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DARPA Funds Research Into a Network-Based Interpretation of Dreams
KentuckyFC writes "Despite the universal experience of dreaming, psychologists and neuroscientists have little understanding of its purpose and mechanisms, or how it varies from one culture to another. So new approaches to oneirology, or dream research, are always welcome. Now a DARPA-funded research team is using network science to analyse dreams for the first time. Dreams have become amenable to network studies because dream reports and their interpretations are now widely available on the web in repositories such as UC Santa Cruz's Dreambank. The DARPA team crawled these databases in English, Chinese and Arabic for symbols that appear in dreams and their descriptions. They then created a network for each language by treating symbols as nodes and linking them to other nodes with similar descriptions. They then searched the networks for regions of more densely connected nodes that form communities. For example, in English, symbols such as 'ladder,' 'hill' and 'goal" form just such a community, representing 'achievement after a struggle.' Finally, they compared the communities from different languages to look for similarities. The results show that dream symbols seem to be connected in similar ways regardless of the cultural background of the dreamers. That provides a new window into the cultural links between dreams experienced by people in different parts of the world."
April 1st coming early this year
Table-ized A.I.
This study doesn't have to do with dreams so much as word association. If you think that multiple cultures having similar dream interpretation reinforces anything about what the dreams actually mean, you'd be a bit misled
Fix the headline!
"DARPA funds psychic friends network"
!!!
Toward a digital Tarot. From Wikipedia : Tarot: "From the late 18th century until the present time the tarot has also found use by mystics and occultists in efforts at divination or as a map of mental and spiritual pathways...."
What, exactly, is the difference between a digital map of "closely connected symbolic nodes" on a network and a "map of mental and spiritual pathways?
Who knows what DARPA is really doing and how much of this is just part of the "4 D's", (Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, Deceive).
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
But forget DARPA for a moment. Since we're talking about dreams, if you have ever considered learning to have lucid dreams, you really ought to go ahead and do it. It's terrific.
I started playing around with the idea in 2010, and it took me a few months but now I've learned to lucid dream at will. It's the most goddamn fun you can have asleep. Plus, it's really useful. I've done things like solve problems in dreams and have the solution at hand when I wake up (it's not always going to actually solve the problem, but it will always make you think about the problem difficulty) and I've even been able to learn to play pieces of music that I'd previously found very difficulty, by playing them in my dreams, even to the point of seeing the score (it's not exactly the same, but it seems to me that if you rehearse something in a lucid dream, it actually helps you in practice when you try it awake).
Honestly. Give it a try. There are plenty of primers on how to do it available. It's easy, you just have to be patient and practice something called a "state test" at various times through the day. It can be as easy as looking at a street sign, and then looking away for a moment and then looking back to see if it says the same thing. The idea is, that you are testing to see if you are awake or in a dream. Then, when you have practiced this a while, you'll be dreaming and you'll do a state test and then WHOA! you'll realize your dreaming and then it's off to the races. There are other techniques too.
Lucid dreaming can make your dream life a blast.
You are welcome on my lawn.