There was once a neural network that used dreaming phases for regularisation. It would run in reverse on random data and whatever activated was down–weighted.
Hinton had a course on Coursera around 2015 that covered a lot of pre NN deep learning. Sadly I don't think it's up anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoRl3Ht4JOcdU872GhiYW...