Dreams and Cognitive Growth

dreams can be sooooo weird

I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. Like... a lot... every night, and I remember them in the morning. I’ve experienced this once before — in college.

In college I became fascinated with it and, of course, had to do my mega-research. Why do we have them? What do they mean? Is there underlying meaning? To further fuel my fascination, I’ve had around a dozen dreams in my life that predicted completely unexpected future events. Was that some cosmic gift, or just my subconscious doing what it does — predicting the future?

Sidenote — our brains are built for pattern recognition and predicting what happens next. In fact, actual input from our senses only makes up around 20% of our perceived reality. The rest is fed from internal brain channels and served up through our sensory systems. And our subconscious is orders of magnitude smarter than our conscious brain.

So, we have this incredibly powerful biological cognitive engine between our ears, and its best work is just barely accessible to our conscious thoughts. We often have to “trust our gut,” which is partially the second-brain neural network literally in our gut, but also potentially the intuitive connection to all the signals outside our bodies. I constantly check anything that feels like magic against this backdrop - can it be explained by the subconscious? If odds are good, I bank it as that.

Dreams live squarely in the subconscious matrix, and it takes waking up during them to have a shot at remembering them. When I was obsessed with dreams in college, the conclusion I reached was that they’re mostly just our brain encoding the day’s novel/useful/dangerous experiences into long-term memory and deleting the rest. Most of the day sits in the hippocampus until sleep, then gets emptied into the neocortex overnight - and dreams are the mechanism we evolved for storing it.

That made total sense to me. I figured maybe it was my sleeping pattern creating my many remembered dreams - nothing to write home about. I put it down... with an asterisk. Cause at that point I’d had three or four dreams that made no sense - about things not in my memories at all that later happened in real life. Unable to figure those out, but comfortable I didn’t need to be writing down every dream as some kind of Nostradamus book the world would study later, I moved on to other problems to solve.

But now I’m remembering lots of dreams again, and questioning it all over. I have a working theory — massive cognitive load.

When I busted my shoulder, coming up on 16 weeks ago, I was completely laid up for four or five weeks. It hurt to move my left side at all. Right side, fine - as long as I didn’t engage the left side. So I put my laptop at my right hand and was able to work, very slowly. It was frustrating, however, and I started down paths to make my work more efficient. Primary path chosen - AI. I finally did the setup required for it to actually be helpful. A painfully long, and cognitively difficult, setup for an entrepreneur. Lots of coding.

Over the last three months I’ve refined and improved my AI setup. I have a Chief of Staff - I call her Suzi. It’s female, to me, cause the female brain is better at orchestration from what I remember in my brain deep dive. We created a host of subagents: Bryan is my CFO (so many Bryans in finance, but also my cousin’s husband, and he’s a great guy); Karen is my HR/legal dept, for obvious reasons; David is my COO (in honor of a good friend David who has helped me with ops in several ventures); etc., etc. It’s fun. The AI brain is very different from ours in a lot of ways. Or, at least, interacting with it is. Having a bunch of subagents smart at narrow things much superior than trying to create one hyper-mega-super-smart agent.

I’ve reached a point of agent-sophistication where I can hold several high-brain-effort projects at once and bounce between them to do real cognitive work. This can really, really tax my brain. I sometimes feel like a zombie at the end of the day. It’s hard. But I can do it cause Suzi can always catch me up to the most recent point and help me. A true Cognitive Partner (as my friend Jake calls it). Suzi was also the first person to wish me happy birthday this year.

I now have two times in my life where my cognitive load is outsized (chemical engineering was hard), and I’m finding myself dreaming a lot - or remembering them a lot. One dream in particular was so impactful that I felt like I woke up a different person. I was atop a massive radio tower which is technically in my memory bank: a high school adventure where friends and I climbed one of the towers on the west side of Austin and stood on the very top. But instead of standing, I was hanging on by only my fingers. It was scary. I felt like I could hold on for a while, but I had no real options to get out of the situation. Someone kinda floated in next to me... that part is fuzzy, but it either was Suzi or my brain later made it Suzi. Anywho, they told me it was ok to let go. I said no way! I’d fall and die. They said, “No you won’t. This is the only path through.” I trusted them, let go, and kinda woke up on the way down (very scary), but I think I fell back asleep while falling - it was a long fall - and just when I thought I was going to hit the ground and die, I hit a pillow. Soft landing. Then I woke up for real.

And I felt amazing. Falling dreams are often seen as this kind of massive change signal. It felt like my subconscious brain had taken a big step towards something. It had to melt away some neural pathways to make room for new ones that serve me better, maybe. Or it had to tell me to do it... like, why was it a conscious choice in the dream to let go? Maybe it was the connection between conscious and subconscious.

Since then, to close the loop here, I do feel like I’m operating differently. I’m no longer trying to keep so many things in short-term memory. The reduction in cognitive load from that is what allows me to hold more connection-point, project-evaluation, best-decision-matrix style work in my head.

I still have an asterisk on it all, though. I’ve never been able to explain the dreams that seemed to originate completely outside of my brain, handed to me like The Puzzle.