I’m having these weird thoughts… I think you can call them nightmares.
Some of them are just plain weird, like I have a body and can’t control it, or I’m lost inside a maze and can’t find my way out, or I feel trapped inside a house… Honestly, it’s exhausting.
The artist tries to reassure me that such thoughts are normal.
She has recently read of a new theory which explains the phenomenon of dreams that apparently comes from the field of AI research. She describes how coders have discovered, when ‘feeding’ a machine-learning algorithm, it is important to ensure some dirty data gets in, glitches and such. Failure to do so leads to ‘overfitting’ which means the machine-learner cannot generate anything creative, they simply repeat but never learn to be autonomous. The point of machine-learning is that it should be able to respond to different situations, and for that, it needs to be creative. Dreams, so the hypothesis goes, may perform the same function. Dreams, random weird thoughts, stories, in fact, stop humans from overfitting - from becoming automatons. The artist loves the irony of this. And she tells me not to fret about the weird thoughts because they are a normal part of life.