About once a year or so, I have an unusually vivid dream. I’m not sure if these dreams actually differ from others, or if I just wake up at an unusual moment.

In any case, these are dreams that stand out to me, and the visuals are often the most interesting bit. Everything appears crystal clear and detailed as I dream, and after getting up, the imagery stays etched in my mind for a while.

In some cases, I’ve documented these rare dreams with a few sentences. To my surprise, it turned out that just a short summary is enough to restore the imagery in my mind later – in some cases even years later. After waiting long enough, the impression resembles any other visual memory, except that it feels a bit more alien.

I’ve sometimes considered making sketches of these dreams, but it always seemed too cumbersome. Could AI help me out here? It’s been a while since I took image generation models on a test run, so I decided to go for another tour. This time I wanted to see if AI would give me a decent approximation of dream visuals without spending a lot of time on prompt engineering.

These are the results.

Dream about an adventure

Prompt

A monstrously large spider monster in a cave, preying on a metallic, quicksilver-like, weirdly shaped blob. The blob is stuck to the ceiling some way above. A friendly person looks in through the door crack of a thick, old, wooden door. The door is set in the cave wall.

Result

Background

This dream was probably inspired by a re-read of Lord of the Rings. (At a later point in my life, it might also have been dubbed “a visit at the in-laws”.) I tried different prompts to get the metallic blob to look ever so slightly anthropomorphic, just as it was in my dream, but such instructions would always mess up other parts of the image.

Dream about feeling crushed

Prompt

An Asian woman sitting on a plain green bench without a backrest. She is wearing rings with very large and colorful gemstones on her hands. Opposite of her, lying flatly on his back on another similar bench, a man is being crushed by a black box. The man holds a cornet with strawberry ice cream in his dangling hand.

Result

Background

This dream was inspired by a girl who preferred another guy over me. They didn’t actually end up exchanging rings and instead split up after a year or so. Ha-Ha!

Dream about fucking up at school

Prompt

A pupil in the hallway of a school, surrounded by a few other pupils. His face shows that he has just realized there is a math exam today and he hasn’t prepared for it.

Result

Background

I used to have this or similar dreams for years after I finished school. In many of these cases, I “realized” during the dream that I had missed something important at school, and thus my college diplomas would also be invalidated! I’d have to go back to school to re-do the final school years, and somehow also juggle this task with my job and family life. Hence the facial expression in the image is hardly exaggerated …

Dream about an old man

Prompt

An old man in a grey and brown checkered suit, feeding ducks with popcorn from a trash bag.

Result

Background

Admittedly, this dream isn’t very outlandish. Some whacko giving inappropriate food to a random type of bird? You know, if you’ve lived in Berlin for long enough, a scene like this may almost give you a fuzzy and homey feeling.

Dream about dancing in the sky

Prompt

A man in black clothes flying through the evening sky and dancing ecstatically at the same time, even contorting himself. The sound of airflow is like a synthesizer pad. The landscape far below is passing by so rapidly that it’s a bit blurry.

Result

Background

I had a high fever when I dreamt this. The dream stood out for being quite synaesthetic and also including some very specific music, full of driving rhythms and suspenseful melodies. I tried to recreate that music in Fruity Loops the next morning, but the sounds evaporated from my memory more quickly than I could rig them up. If I ever have such a musical dream again, I’ll try using a music generator like Suno for a quick shot.

Dream about Crete

Prompt

A long barren coastline of Crete, with steep cliffs and several white-washed, high-rising monasteries and several very high arches dispersed across it.

Result

Background

I’ve visited Crete a few times as a kid. There were more and taller arches in the dream, like in a photo-realistic version of a de Chirico painting. However, any changes I made to the prompt made other bits worse, e.g. the coastline would turn less Cretan, so I left it at this.

Dream about misery

Prompt

The stairwell of a rundown prefabricated building. It is almost too dark to see anything. On an intermediate storey, there is an entrance to an elevator. The door is missing. Inside the elevator, there is a piece of burnt tinfoil on the ground, as well as a black Ghettoblaster. Both are just about visible in the dark. In the back of the elevator, there is a subtle shadow of a cowering dark figure.

Result

Background

I was probably processing my regular encounters with drug addicts on Berlin’s streets in this one. (And while this dream had a nightmarish touch, it’s worth noting that the increase in foil smoking in recent years is arguably a good trend, as it is a lot less harmful to the addicts than syringes.)

Dream about Darth Vader

Prompt

Darth Vader inhaling gummy bears through the grille of his helmet, profile view.

Result

Background

This dream was unusual in that I honestly had to chuckle when I woke up. There were gummy bears at the party the night before. Not sure where that Vader guy came from. Probably just existential dread or something.

Conclusion

Do some of these images look like what I saw in my dreams? Yes – somewhat! A few come quite close, which made it ever the more frustrating that I could never get the final 20% right. As you may have guessed, all these prompts went through a few iterations, and I tried each of them in two or three models. Yet in all of the cases, I hit a brick wall at some point.

I’m not saying this is the model’s fault. Well, okay, in some cases it is. E.g., for the dream with the two green benches, I couldn’t get the benches to stand opposite of each other and still preserve other aspects of the image, no matter which way I described it, and this doesn’t sound like a very challenging requirement at face value. It would have been a lot easier to explain this to a human artist. I’d probably just use my hands to demonstrate the spatial arrangement.

I could certainly still get better at prompting, but in some cases, there might be a limit to language, no matter whether the recipient is a human or a machine. Just because a highly specific image exists in someone’s head, that doesn’t mean there is an exact and unambiguous way to get it out of there in one go, without iterating on intermediate results. We’re not pixel enumerators, after all, and I guess that’s exactly why we can have such rich, multi-layered, absurd, yet often pretty experiences.

If I wanted these images to really approximate the “originals”, I’d either have to whip out photoshop and at the very least stitch together multiple generated images, or iterate and rely heavily on in- and out-painting. So at this point, I’m not sure using AI beats sketching or writing a short summary for the purpose of keeping a hold of dream visuals. Sketching probably still has a better balance of speed and authenticity, though of course generated images look nicer. Another thing worth trying might be to first make a sketch, and then augment it with AI. Or, you know, just reading out the images directly from the brain.