Dream Recorder AI – a portal to your subconscious | Hacker News Reader

Dream Recorder AI – a portal to your subconscious

dreamrecorder.ai

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I think it's meant as an art piece, not a product. I liked that the call to action is "BUILD YOUR OWN" instead of "BUY NOW ($599)".

It's a fancy dream journal. It doesn't record brain activity.

We will one day have the technology to actually record dreams, however. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40876481/, Reconstructing high-resolution visual perceptual images from human intracranial electrocorticography signals (2025)

> Reconstruction of visual perception from brain signals has emerged as a promising research topic. Electrocorticography (ECoG) is a kind of high-quality intracranial signal with good spatiotemporal resolution that offers some new opportunities. However, according to our knowledge, there are no studies to reconstruct the perceived images from human ECoG signals at present.

> We have conducted the pioneering work and developed a novel pipeline that integrates Talairach coordinate alignment masked autoencoders (TA-MAE) with denoising diffusion probabilistic models. Our approach exploits the spatiotemporal dynamics of human ECoG signals, enabling the restoration of details in high-resolution

Why would I use a low fidelity version when I can just recall a high fidelity version directly in my mind? You too can achieve this by training dream recall, by keeping a dream journal for example. After a while you will notice you can remember nearly everything about dreams and will start lucid dreaming as well.

I was in college before I realized this wasn’t a universal thing. 15 years later I was finally exposed to the bit where some people don’t have an inner monologue or a minds eye.

I wonder if they’re related.

Hello from the other side!

I was about 45 before I realised that when people said “in my mind’s eye” it was substantially more than a metaphor.

And it wasn’t until about a year later that I realised that I also didn’t have what ordinary people refer to as an inner monologue.

Realising that I had both aphantasia and anendophasia was quite a shock, but has never felt to me like I was missing anything.

For images I literally have nothing “pictorial” or “graphical” at all, but concepts and relationships are “vivid”. And for the inner monologue, there’s no autonomic voice at all, but if I concentrate in the same way that someone might “consciously breathe” I can kinda sorta trigger something.

Interestingly, in periods where I have meditated for >20min per day for consecutive weeks, I can trigger what I refer to as “flyover mode” which is like a literal landscape flyover that feels like a 4K screensaver. But this is _rare_ and requires a huge amount of effort.

Weird, eh!?

Oh hi! Do you have vivid dreams??

I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I generally have extremely vivid dreams. I also have a very active inner-monologue and can do the whole “picture a red apple on a green lawn with 3 yellow dots on it, pick it up and rotate it and track the dots” kind of thing. As it happens I’m a visual learner and a voracious reader.

I’ve never thought about if any of this was connected before. I should do some research.

I have dreams, but they're almost always non-visual, at least in the traditional sense, or when compared to other people I know who recount their dreams to me, and I very rarely "remember" (if that's the right word) them in any detail. I sometimes (rarely) will have visual dreams, but that almost always happens after I've had a good night's sleep, woken up, and then fallen back to sleep again. I think it might have something to do with how deeply I sleep when I am asleep. A train could drive past my bed and I wouldn't wake up.

I find that my dreams start fading the more awake I am, unless they were more intense than usual. How do you keep that mental twilight long enough to write the details?

Wake up and immediately start writing them down. Sometimes I use a voice recorder app to do the same, I believe there are apps out there for dream specific voice or text journaling but I just use my phone, used a physical journal previously. After a few weeks you'll be able to remember them fully.

I kept a dream journal for years and very rarely had lucid dreams. 6-8 times at most over 30 years. I definitely got better at remembering dreams -- it also helped if I could build a narrative that would keep the different segments tied together.

For some people it's more natural, with DILD (dream induced lucid dreams) but others need to practice the skill explicitly, such as with WILD (wake induced lucid dreams) methods.

Waking up every morning to relay my dream of Will Smith eating spaghetti once again.

For real though, who exactly is this for? People who want to see an AI's take on the real dream they just had?

This makes no sense. If I'm putting my dreams into words, that's already as good as it's gonna get. Why make it even lossier by involving AI? In fact, it's even worse than just lossy since incorrect details will be added in!

This idea is also pretty obvious. Who hasn't tried describing a dream to AI and been disappointed with the slop it generates? It will never look anything like what was imagined. Most of the imagery in my mind is unique to stuff I have experienced in my real life offline. AI training data is biased very far away from anything so candid, and if the images are wrong then they also cannot convey the same emotions that the words did.

This problem occurs again and again with damn near everything AI generates. All emotion and style are replaced with the kind of stale and cold feelings you only get from stock photos, trashy low effort music, and corporate speak.

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