Dream Teams.

Photo by Simon Thorogood, courtesy of Hatfield House.

“Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding…”

― John Locke. Philosopher and political theorist.

With the release of a recent UNESCO report on the global decline of the creative industries, we might find ourselves moving perilously closer to a period of retreat and abdication in the Arts. To avert any such episodic failure, we need to advance and evolve cultures of visionary dreaming.

A newly published Unesco report entitled, ‘Reshaping Policies for Creativity,’ has highlighted how nearly 10 million creative jobs worldwide were lost in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite the creative industries representing one of the fastest growing economies in the world, artists, designers, their output and intellectual property can be the least respected by global business practice. Whilst the demand and consumption of cultural content markedly increased during the pandemic, correspondingly the makers of work reported finding it difficult to survive as commissioners and end users do not always want to pay commensurately for material.

As part of the very rapid migration online, many creative personnel, services, and skills were quickly re-configured, and in some cases entirely lost, through digitisation of product or service. It has been this transformation, at pace, that has destabilised an already precarious cultural ecosystem for the arts and creative sectors.

The issue may yet prove to be compounded by creative learning institutions choosing to trade riskier learning environments and ‘contingent’ teachers for more economically streamlined and convenient working models that centre around increased studentship.

Reverie of Thought.

If this development is to be arrested and reversed, we must all recognise the importance of speculating, fictionalising and dreaming in order to foster innovation and difference for education, culture and commerce.

So, if we consider the realm of dreams, we can recognise this as a complex and often disharmonised field of investigation, with no solid or unified scientific understanding in place. Perhaps the first scientific research investigations began with an extensive study by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman, at the University of Chicago in 1953, who observed dreaming occurring within REM sleep patterns.

Although, it has yet to be established if there is any primary function to dreaming, dreams nonetheless represent imaginative adventures of the mind. This can reinforce a notion that humans, as other cognitive beings, thrive on mental stimulus.

It might be, then, that dreams serve to uniquely introduce us to fantastic narratives from our unconscious and non-conscious states. By resolutely engaging with them, we are able to disengage from daily routines to develop and extend our own imagination and artistry.

Oddity Programming.

In order to sustain stimulation and piquancy, we must continually seek and invent new concepts of abnormality and variety. I call this enterprise ‘oddity programming’ – investing in divergent conditions necessary for creative, spiritual, and intellectual nourishment and intensification. Such practice will not only assist in the enhancement of our mental states but, in turn, will instruct and ‘dress’ our corporeal body and environments too.

In the midst of the Covid lockdowns, many of us had to contend with narrowed or diminished living and working environments. Yet, the human estate needs to register new and unexpected experiences to prosper. This is where dreaming, day-dreaming, and other forms of fictionalising can provide us with the necessary deviation and escape from the prosaic, whether that may implicate banality, indifference, or dilemma.

If we consider dreaming and day-dreaming as a work-out for our imaginations, we can recognise the value of this in much the same way a treadmill exercises our body. But, it is the very strangeness of dreams, as well as other means of ‘opting out’ (expressed through the arts, for instance) that can facilitate a healthy detachment from the ordinary, and provide revision to our thoughts and actions.

Dreaming Up Possibilities.

“...every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation.”

Current neuroscience research at Tufts University in Massachusetts is showing that repeatedly performing a new task or activity will actually stimulate vivid dreams and where, in turn, magnified dreaming can ardently enhance skills or tasks in our waking life. A developing theory of ‘nextup’ (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities), also proposes that dreams orchestrate novel ways for us to explore what we have recently learnt or ‘felt.’

This might tell us that expressions and episodes of ‘fantasy’ do enhance our ability to imagine possibilities and subsequently build them into our future behavior. Such rationale also coalesces with neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti’s theory of ‘mirror systems.’ Mirror systems, or otherwise ‘mirror neurons,’ represent a form of imitation learning, whereby through direct observation of an action, process, sport, or cultural event, some correlating skill or artistry can be sensed, learnt and exercised by the observer.

In short, neuroscience is progressively showing that we can become, to some extent, what we see and what we think. We can actively flourish or become creatively ‘charged’ by attending the ballet, losing (and finding) ourselves in a film or piece of music, or watching the Winter Olympics, for example. Accordingly, as a way to advance embodied simulation, mirror systems show that the cognitive structures involved in our own bodily sensations contribute to the conceptualisation of what we observe (or think we observe) in the world around us. This also ties in with neurophysiologist Gerald Edelman’s assertion that “every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation.”

Oddity Programming might help prompt and instruct humans, computers and systems to accommodate more unaccustomed or obscure inputs and scenarios, even if this may mean we never quite receive the answer we thought we might. Of course, this can be very useful, and is how new knowledge is frequently discovered.

So, like dreaming, an acknowledgement of ‘disorder’ as something meaningful is leading some computer scientists to develop what is called ‘overfitting’ – programmes that operate with ambiguous, unstable, and even chaotic data. Where, the human mind has always demonstrated great capacity to ‘overfit,’ we need to address an imperative and responsibility to invest more in disruptive creative processing, not less.

In this regard too, the human mind can establish clear (or unclear) distinctions from machine learning, AI, and neural networks. Current AI tends to learn from the processing of recognised or familiar data, and therefore its limitation can be that it works primarily with discernible information.

So again, we may be reminded that outlets, platforms, laboratories and teams of ambitious conjecturing, dreaming, and oddity programming remain crucial to creativity, innovation, and the vital nourishment of people, places, and instruments of new learning.

So, team up, dream on and dream bigger.