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by r3bl 2708 days ago
> I dreamt about it

I would not believe that this was possible if the same thing didn't happen to me. Also about World of Warcraft. Just once.

The next day I got bored killing creatures on some side quest, a thought came through my mind ("what am I doing with my life?"), and I've never looked back.

2 comments

Happened to me all the time. I fondly remember dreaming of an infinite minesweeper plane where I could effortlessly solve pattern after pattern, forever.

That's when I realized that dreams are a mechanism the brain uses to train itself in a best-effort simulation of recent new challenges. Probably for committing new learnings from conscious understanding roughly analogous to symbolic AI to subconscious pattern matching more similar to ML. Months after I remembered those minesweeper dreams, I was able to multitask any though process that did not involve eyes and hands parallel to the game, in fact I solved my fastest boards when my conscious mind was completely distracted from the game. (and it was an addiction, and I've grown or of it)

Dreams are some mixup of things that happened during the day. No need to read too much into them. I've dreamt of work, people, hobbies including computer games and cherished activities not practised for years at the time of the dream. Dreaming of "stuff that happened", basically.
Dreaming of stuff that happened can be useful if you take it seriously. I often visit experiences in sleep which, when they happened, had led me to say to myself, "I should think about that, figure out what I could have done differently, what might have been going through their heads."

Evolution doesn't tend to waste things. As long as some processing is happening, it might as well be put to good use.