As explained in Memory we see dreaming and memory as being very closely related. In our projects we store episodic memories as triples, so they can be woven into the the same knowledge map. But episodic memories will also have emotional valencies attached as this can then help drive which memories are returned from a search, but also how a memory might fade over time. We've begun to play with a memory model where when the virtual human goes to "sleep", the days memories are pruned and those with low valency and high repetition are deleted or faded, and then older memories undergo the same process. And of course whilst the bot is going through that pruning exercise the memories it handles could be made manifest as dreams!
And of course with access to virtual worlds there is no reason why the "dream" couldn't be built as a virtual world that the virtual human is then dropped into to experience the dream, before waking to surface in their "real" and consensual virtual world.
Interesting papers and books:
- Kelley (2014) discusses the losing of memories and looks at how episodic memories can be ‘pruned’ in a method analogous to dreaming - exactly in line with our thoughts
- There's also an EU project on this we think - we'll track it down.
This is an area of profound interest to us and we'll write more later.