Free association and exploring dream content to find inner truth was Freud wading through the mind. My Freudbot wades through internet datasets and constructs a new dreamscape from your dream. I wanted to realise a new Eliza or parallel the complexity of the mind to the internet, perhaps make some sense of new ontological theories about the interconnectedness of all objects... but I just ended up hating Freud and Google.

My chosen escapism is sleep. during lockdown, i would sleep away the day. I recognise that it's unhealthy, but I didn't really care at the time. I would wake, read a book, and fall asleep once again. "I suppose lockdown turned into a dream for you". Yes it did, lots of people associate the conditions of lockdown to dreaming, or actually dazed themselves so much that it felt like it. For me, so much sleep meant I was perpetually in a semi-waking state, affording me many lucid dreams and drawn internal monologues of imagined realisations about the non-real universe existing in my dreams. "trapped in your own head?" No, I'd say I was bored and alone. Nothing really interested me and the world was distant and vacant, only blue light imitations of reality were offered to me. Dreaming offers an escape. Theories are still quoted on how dreaming could be the "guardian of sleep". Your mind tricking you out of reality to relieve your real senses. This is a theory used by Sigmund Freud in his argument for dreams existing as "wish fulfillments" to the mind. To Freud, all dreams have the purpose of fulfilling a wish that can draw your consciousness away from your body. In "The Interpretation Of Dreams" Freud presents a method of analyzing your dream under the premise that to understand how your dream fulfills a wish, you can understand your psyche, therefore discover the source of mental illness and such. Freud offered a try at rationalising dreams and their content, which results in the same problem which occurs in philosophy. Freud was a trained physician in an age of revolutionary science, read in German idealism and romanticism as part of natural-philosophy of the day, and therefore seeks solutions to problems by digging down, categorizing, picking apart the pieces of an object to discover its base elements and root source. But in applying this logic to dreams he creates a science of a poets game, often even quoting works of writers and poets who produce work based on dreamcontent associations. Being able to understand your unconscious desires(wish fulfillment) will enlighten you and show the inner mechanism to understanding of your mind - this has been met with contention, proven wrong and proven not to deliver. Freud is titled as the "father of Psycho-analysis" and often of psychology, but since then the science of psychology has flipped to exclude as much as possible theories produced by Freud and his successors. I parallel this with some theories in philosophy, with the goal in metaphysics to unravel the universe rationally and realise philosophy as a science - This being met with contradiction and debate long enough to know that there will not be a final interpretation of reality and Being. dreams are confused, incoherent and exist only in the psych, which means they make no sense bound to reality but Freud insists that if you can dream it, it will originate from experience and through this argument makes wild associations, the most famous of these are phallic innuendoes. Here is Freuds example, of his own dream, that he uses to demonstrate dream analysis. dream analysis (my Irma)

"Critic, a kindly critic of the Interpretation of Dreams, writes in Critical Literature: 'From this point on, not many of us will be able to follow Freud as he gets lost in his own intellectual ego' But Critic has not undertaken any analyses of dreams, and will not believe how unjustifiable it is to judge them by the manifest dream-content." Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams(p. 85) Here is my parody of it using a dream recorded in my dream diary. - Barcelona, a hot day and lots of people sat about. The scene of a very uncomfortable family holiday a good few years ago. I come from a large family and when we go on holiday it can get crowded and arguments always start. Because of this i would wanna get away. - The café barista lets me work after we talk. this was particularly anxious time for me, I would sit in cafes by myself amongst lots of chatting people, having got away from my family. Talking to the cafe barista in the dream wouldn't have happened in real life. - We are out of coffee, I had overlooked it. Previous day, prior to having this dream, this had happened at home, though it was not necessarily my fault. I had only finished the coffee off and the next person to make coffee had complained of no one refilling it. I go to get coffee from a town on a high rock The high rock and climbing is reminiscent of a video game I have recently tried in which you scale large cliffs. - I enter the market and head to the first coffee seller and ask for coffee. At this point in the dream I am aware of the tide coming in - I escape across the causeway, water around my heels. but I feel confident. The town across the causeway is effectively St Michael's mount, the causeway has ankle deep water for an hour before it rises. Once, I assured my younger brother it was fine to cross while neglecting to relay this information. it made me feel clever once my 'intuition' paid off. this dreams fulfills my wish to refill the coffee, my anxiety to approach the seller, and prove my capability which my ego believes is plenty and unrecognised. Freud reads meaning without reason for specific selection, just because he can make an association. It's true that everything has connotations and influences but dreams are by nature - incoherent to the point of complex. Much like the literary scholar dissecting one line from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"; many associations and potential word-plays; paragraphs discussing potential intentionality behind one word used among many, Freud seeks something intended by the subconscious when finding links between "dream-content". But Freud uses this technique only in relation to the record of the dream, the recollection. from this point, the dream has already been translated from mental thought, whether that be the sounds, smells, visuals or feelings of the dream, into written word and from that point he interprets. "Freud was interested in slips of the tongue" says the author of the foreword Mr Oxford posh bloke Stephen Wilson, when writing about Freuds consideration of the unconsidered parts of the dream as of when it was recorded. But this both shows Freud as thinking he can see sources of dreams before the dreamer can, and also he thinks he can account for a complete dream interpretation, without experiencing the dream himself, which I would describe as like being to tell of the personality of a dog from reading the dog's entrails. Freud, I think, came from a time of German-Idealism which emphasises emotional self-awareness as a necessary pre-condition to improving the human condition. In German-Idealism, only the consciousness is knowable and the best way of perceiving reality is through some subjective feeling or intuition, through which we participate in the subject of our knowledge, instead of viewing it from the outside. Everything is an experience, and not an object for manipulation and study, and, once experienced, the individual becomes in tune with their feelings and this is what helps them to create moral values. This approach actually occurred in response to the over-rationalisation of philosophy when influenced by the enlightenment period. Freud is against the categorizing of dreams, instead opting to have one solution to study all dreams and reworking the method based on the content and history of the patient, which I would parallel to different literary techniques. I would like to point now that I have written too many notes on what I read and then feel they are important when they probably are not. Modern social sciences often use Freud only as a base to explain the development of modern day theories, and treatments in psychiatry. The only mentions I have enjoyed in my scouting for Freud-bashing literature include: • Freud's Women by Lisa Appignanesi, John Forrester - Which discusses Freud in Feminism. I found it an uncomfortable read, I returned it to the library at about 1/3 complete. Uncomfortable because of how two sided it is, how Freud's theories of hysterics and female penis envy are seriously considered. • Freud and Psychoanalysis: An Exposition and Appraisal by Richard Stevens. - Which explains why Freud's technique never worked but gives props to him for "revolutionising". I gave up after two chapters but skimmed the rest for quotes like a good student. • I went back to read Reassembling the Social by Bruno Latour as I could remember a description that compares Freuds technique of dream-content association with Latour's and John Law's Actor Network Theory. Latour describes Freud's short-fall in broadening his associations, and makes the argument that Freud way hasty to provide solutions to patients. • One or Several Wolves is a critique of Freud by Deleuze and Guattari in their writing "A thousand Plateaus"at this point I haven't come across anything as opposed to Freud (though I haven't read that much yet). Deleuze and Guattari don't really bother deconstructing Freud's arguments, they more or less completely disregard them. They deconstruct Freud's definition of neurosis and psychosis. Freud claims that neurotics are those who are "capable of making a global comparison between a sock and a vagina, a scar and Castration", but then they some how are incapable of perceiving larger connections within the world. Freud disregards what the pair call "multitudes" and ideas of collective consciousness, impulse and pack mentality. The Wolfman case study is used as many analyses have been made by different experts and the to commonly agreed ones oppose Freud's. The pair label it Freud's "reductionist" method of psychoanalysis and they see Freud's use and development of the theory of the Oedipus complex as idealist since it tries to give voice to the unconscious but fails.

How can I determine the best interpretation of a piece of language by considering, enacting it in different ways. I should try enacting the dream in different ways to potentially rediscover the experience of it. There are exercises of this with literature and religion, for example Shakespeare's texts are acted out and parts of religious scripts sung in hymns or mantras, through this the texts are realised in different ways and can mean different things. With dreams it is more difficult.

Have a computer read it? Eliza is an early Natural Language Processor(NLP) from the 60s and acts as a therapist through a computer. It responds to your input by rephrasing your input and asking a question - a recognised technique that is attributed to some bloke called Carl Rogers. My bot listens and encourages while you explain your dream. In this way, you recollect your dream through conversation. I think this probably works better than a note since it can prompts neglected details that could go unnoticed. This version of my bot is Freudian because after 8 questions it will try to compile your dream but fail, resulting in it choosing one of five generalised conclusions, a truly hasty conclusion. This satirical therapy has mainly resulted from my inability to get the NLP i was working with to string the inputs together in a nice way. I didn't want it to just list your responses, I wanted it to sum up the conversation, but my test method was too entertaining.

My final experimentation is built on the idea of recording the dream
through a dialogue, again with a computer. It is composed through several
technologies in order to provide agency for re-constructing a dream. It
translate the dream less directly than the ideas of the machines in Inception
and Paprika. It depends of the idea of the record which is created acting as
a reminder, since it cannot truly visually reconstruct the dream, the images
inserted into the collage are ones generic to the language heard by the
machine.
It works using four parts, My NLP chatbot prompts the user into recounting
the dream and providing contents. I have experimented with different ways
of recognising details in the inputted responses using NLP but I have only
a basic input system working. But if working, my code finds nouns and
significant phrases in the conversation it has with the user.
Using these phrases, the code sends them to a Google web search API which
returns generic images of the web. These are the first images at the top of
the page when the phrase is searched in Google Images, I like this as these
tend to be ultimately generic in terms to the language, the web has chosen
these to represent the language and vice versa (lang rep img).
These Images are cut out using a content awareness tool part of OpenCV.
this leaves a cut out with transparent background. this cut out is scaled to
the background.
these are all added to the same image in random places, creating what I'd
call a Dada like collage dreamscape. The random placing is good because in
creates a collage rather than tries to recreate a reality like scene.
This code does not reproduce the dream, it creates from what can be
remembered from it.
The bot asks until you stop and the Collage is created.
                        

Try the bot here(If Google permits).

Here is the code for the original collage dream bot.

These two pictures are dreamscapes produced by the bot.

Since the 2.2 hand in, I have spent time developing the bot idea of the dream analysis. I believe the value in approaching the practice of dream analysis using computers is interesting because on the way that a computer could use the infomation of a dream to produce something logical. Freud's main flaw seen by his critics was his stretching of association. For a computer to do this, using the mass global brain of the internet or to have a limited trusted library of association, adds an authority to any associations and analysis produced but of the lack of human. But what I have found by trying to develop the bot further to find weighted points in text addressed to it, is that the more the computer and interpret and read back your dream with understanding, the more in sound human. Feeding the computer dreams can build it's conciousness in a way, maybe it's because computers don't dream.

Here is my bot. It will help talk through your dreams and it is picking up weighted, repeated parts. Using these parts in my next script, we construct a new reality to re-enter and examine the surroundings of.

The way this new dream reality is constructed using your dream content, as picked up on by the machine, is curently by generating a text based adventure. This I thought of because of my dislike of the visual method of constucting dreamscapes that the original bot had. The original bot was good because of its connection to the internet hive mind, pulling google's immediate visual association to what was part of your dream, but there was no practical way of making it work soundly and by using the visual medium, my machine entered the realm of dreams as a logical reality inside your head, I believe you can think dream without visuals. Freud didn't paint your dreams for this reason, its why Paprika or Inception will never be real. Using language, the ways of interpeting the dream to consruct the new one, is what allows to to bridge the recognised dream content and the tool and method of entering the dream, which is your head.

I've only managed to use the text adventure part on a very basic level. The most difficult part of it is getting the bot to ask naturally for a way of connecting parts of a dream. This script needs three main conponents, location, characters, things. My bot can recognise these three things fairly easily, but its a good way of linking different locations or characters or things, which is hard since dreams can be so sporadic and disconnected. I'm not trying to constuct narrative, but just create a network of dream things in a context. My text based adventure generator does this but only to a certain point.

SOME MORE NOTES

The bots was reaction to my conclusions and takes on the research and reading i'd done on my project, id taken it down a route that i could not really sum up in my thoughts to begin with. 
        the bot meant the dream content was found in the internet brain, perhaps i liked how it abstracts your dream and makes it visual, less mentally tangible and meaningful and more real, visual. it compares freuds free association to the messiness of the internet network, amounting in this methological proccess much like deep dream, being able to see things in things, machines recognising things that people cant, this has value in its self, 
        
        you enter a dream object into the bot, rather than retreive the image from your head, the bot retrieves it from the internet, providing a kind of internet psycho analysis.
        
        . perhaps making a tool, but it was rather a statement of woes. 
        
        i admit they have no real function, to think they would actually help in psychoanalysis is absurd, if you can remeber then you would not need a visual mock up, also dreams are not static images. 
        i never was making this under the geuise that it would benefit anyone in this way, or function based on the general purpose, it was almost a research tool to recover my perspective in the project, and from it i found this generalised critique of free asociation and broad consideration.
        
        i think to exclude the visual side of my craft would benefit the rigidity of the subject, that of thinking and associating. 
        
        Falcon-Hoof 
        An improv bot, adventure text game 
        image generation at same time?
        
        Try a rivescript bot, insert ocasional text interludes, generated based on improv between bot and user, images along the way?
        
        Freud's position in the course, Sean Hall annoys me becuase he mentions Freud far too often in such a loving and convicted manner.
        
        The dream as innocent adventure, dreams are obviously a component of story telling and a tihng that applys to all people who sleep, using it as a multitude.
        
        Collecting dreams, dream diary, trend in dreams, dream interpretation and the magical divination, cartomancy of the dream by writing down the dream on cards and ordering it in a way after forgetting the real order of the dream. 
        
        Exract dreams in a freudian manner and bring conciousness to them.
        Let your dream talk back at you.
        
        I dont think freud has the authority to make these associations but the internet could, a robot could, with the experiece, the machine learning.