Ask HN: Can your AI dream?

Dreaming is (plausibly) connected with learning, or with transferring short-term memory to long-term. If you are trying to create a human-equivalent AI, would it be beneficial for it to dream? Would it be essential for it to dream?

How would an AI dream? How would you create an AI so that it would dream?

Or is this whole idea insane? (That is, am I dreaming?)