(ESSAY) 'It came to me in an algorithm' by Marianne Tambini

Who's afraid of hearing your dreams? In this essay for Digital Dreamland, Marianne Tambini identifies overlaps between the world of latent and online content. How does the information overload of addictive social media platforms alter the way we read? How do we 'read' our dreams and how might this reading affect our waking reality? Might dreams be the currency of many intimacies? Read on to turn inside-out that fine, private membrane of the unconscious...

‘Is this trying to tell me something?’

In dreams and in the content offered us by algorithms, we see our desires reflected back to us, and we know this. So in waking/post-scrolling reflection on these experiences, we look for answers to the fundamental question: what do I want?  Are we looking in the right places?

While I can’t believe it, I have been told that people don’t want to hear about others’ dreams because it’s mundane and meaningless. (I think it’s deeply fascinating, and also the funniest thing ever, but maybe it can be those things and also mundane and meaningless.)

I, for one, absolutely love hearing about people’s dreams: it makes me feel close to them. A few times recently, I’ve had similar conversations with people about the content social media platforms show them. They let me in, telling me what they see when they are alone in bed at night, or mid-afternoon on the sofa.

A lot of chat now stems from ‘I saw a video’...

My little sister told me that she says ‘I read somewhere’ when she means she saw a TikTok. There’s so much stuff out there that it often feels like each of us is living in our own little dreamworld of content, less coherent from person to person than the physical world. Last weekend, the question ‘have you seen the wine tasting guy?’ revealed that yes, we all had, but he appeared in different forms for each of us.

Sometimes, you do find something you’ve both seen online, or you reveal it, turning your personal affective sphere inside out, making a moment that felt individual into a shared experience. I have once had the same dream as a friend on the same night - we were 19, living together during lockdown and spending all our time together. We never got over the surprise, but it definitely sealed our bond.

Both online spaces and dream worlds (to a lesser extent) are deeply personal planes, while also being interactive. Maybe this is weird, but I've more than once got in touch with old friends online after they've popped up in a dream, and I'm always flattered when people dream about me no matter if they're killing me, kissing me or we go swimming during a zombie apocalypse*. The classic archetype of getting pissed off with your partner for cheating on you in a dream is reborn in the form of annoyance at the posts they see or like. Although there is something which seems more actual about interacting with someone's online presence than their appearance as a dream character, both are examples of our social worlds appearing to us in a highly subjective way that can affect our relationships.

You can see what people you follow have liked, or even look over someone else’s shoulder while they scroll, if they let you, but it is so far not possible to watch someone’s dreams. Through developing and demonstrating shared interests, scrolling can give us the possibility of forging connection with real people that might otherwise have remained relative strangers. Dreaming is more individualistic, or at least the intimacy it provides is restricted by the requirement that you deliberately share its content.

There's something exposing about telling someone what you've dreamt about, but equally potentially embarrassing to show or tell them what you've been advertised by an algorithm which is supposed to know you. A friend of mine, a man in his 40s, first got TikTok two years ago and was appalled to discover that it seemed to be a platform exclusively dedicated to sexualised teenage girls and people smoking crack - why had no one told him this before? Within weeks, though, he was a convert, as the algorithm began to show him things related to his work and artistic practice. (My guess is that a lot of people in his age and gender category often pay attention to the former content, which is why it came up first.)

With dreams and online experiences, we often spot patterns, such as recurring moments in dreams (my best friend always runs over a dog in her dreams, so she’s never learned to drive). This is perhaps more true with online experiences because there is more consciousness of the fact that it is externally constructed. It has become quite common to say ‘the algorithm is showing me…’ or even refer to ‘my algorithm’, as if it’s a barber or a butler.

When we spot patterns, we get the urge to interpret them. Dream interpretation is a millennia-old practice, and algorithm interpretation, though newer, is certainly also becoming commonplace. Does my dream about my friend's colleague mean that I fancy them? Do the repeated adverts I'm getting for plastic surgery mean I should get plastic surgery?*

While I prefer to think about what my dreams mean about my own subconscious, interpreters of dreams over the centuries have often preferred the idea that dreams give us access to a divine or other realm from which they came. For example, in Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich describes a series of fever dreams in which she experiences the suffering of Jesus and a loving relationship with him. Similarly, Carl Jung suggested that in interpreting dreams, we gain access to a collective unconscious from which they arise. For both Julian and Jung, dreams come from somewhere else.

This view of dreams makes them more equivalent to our scrolling experiences, which are implanted for us by a mysterious mechanism controlled by forces more powerful than ourselves. 

Some people have tried to interpret dreams as predictions. In the old testament and in one of its most well-known adaptations, the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, Joseph has a gift for seeing the future in his dreams. He is persecuted for this but eventually forges a successful political career using his skill. Even though I don't think dreams predict the future, I have definitely acted differently based on things that have happened in my dreams. When I was fifteen, I had a dream I kissed a boy I knew, and then I went out with him for three years. This morning, I awoke from a dream I was late to the dentist so I ran out the door in a panic with twenty minutes to spare.

The algorithm would also like to claim to predict the future - a future in which you have bought this hairdryer which is essentially a balloon you tie to your head, a future in which you eat cucumber salad until cucumbers go extinct. Maybe the mechanism isn't so different - both dreams and content can be self-fulfilling prophecies.

Dreams and the algorithm both interact in somewhat opaque ways with our desires. In recent years across social media platforms, there has been a move away from the ‘following’ model - seeing content predominantly from accounts you choose to subscribe to - towards the ‘for you’/’explore’ format. This is more personalised but with less conscious user control, making it more dreamlike and giving our online experiences more of a possibility to surprise and capture us. What we see online both depends on and determines our characteristics, relationships, memories, and desires. We are at a point now where the Spotify robot chooses our music tastes, while beauty standards and clothing trends are similarly algorithmically fashioned.

The question of agency in dreams is beyond this essay, but for most people, most of the time, the dream self is not connected to our will in the same way as the waking self.In dreams and online, there are unclear or multiple selves at play. The online self that is the scroller is not the same as the person in your selfie or the person in your tagged photos, or the person seen by your cookies**. Similarly, in dreams I can be a different person, or an animal, or myself but doing things I would never do, or watching myself from a third person perspective.

We identify to varying extents with these selves, but tend not to consider them as exactly the same as the conscious, predominantly offline ‘me’. Another brief note on the question of agency and control: I don't know about you, but I find myself bodily paralysed apart from my eyes moving rapidly in only two situations. They are when I'm scrolling on my phone, unable to stop, and during REM sleep.

We do tend to have a bit more control over the algorithm than our dreams: we know that by interacting with certain types of content we can increase the likelihood that we are shown more of it. Usually, we interact with posts based on emotional engagement/curiosity, but it is possible to “trick” the algorithm. Instagram reels taught me Italian after I started interacting with only Italian content. It is also possible to lucid dream – to know one is dreaming and in some cases gain control of the situation/implant things in your dreams. Aaron Smuts argued that we in some sense author our dreams, even when they are not lucid, as ‘who else could be responsible’?

In both dreaming and scrolling, we are not exactly choosing what we see, but we are not totally deprived of agency. It might seem then, that dreams can help us to answer the question  we all want to resolve: ‘what do I want?’.

But it's a dangerous game too: take the hypothesis that the YouTube algorithm pushes far right content, creating a nightmare-like ‘rabbit-hole’. These platforms are not just reflecting you, they are more like a fun house mirror, where your image looks back at you, not as you recognise it or as it really exists, but shaped and shifted and with other distorted figures appearing in your peripheral vision.

One big difference between dreaming and scrolling is that while asleep we are at perhaps our most unproductive - in dreams we might be the closest we get to experiencing totally free time. However, as I try to remind myself, scrolling is actually doing free work for Mark Zuckerberg. It's making money for someone else and, at the end of the day, only really gives the illusion of relaxation.

In You Are the Product, Rosanna McLaughlin points out that, as online experiences go, being advertised an incredibly ugly pair of shoes is more ‘disturbing’ than images of violence or unsolicited dick-pics. It prompts the question ‘who do they think I am?’. McLaughlin then asks, ‘who am I to say that my conscious mind knows better than the cold, hard data mined from my search history and conversations with friends?’. Maybe these really are her dream shoes. 

Likewise, in interpreting our dreams, we sometimes appeal to the idea that dreams know us better than we know ourselves - that I can infer information about who I am and, crucially, what I should do. The idea that the subconscious somehow “knows better” is a powerful one since at least the dawn of 20th century psychoanalysis. But it also exists in common sense/parlance, in the idea that we should make decisions based on our subconscious desires: ‘Follow your dreams’.

When compared to following the subconscious desires reflected on a ‘for you’ page, following your dreams seems to be a risky strategy. If we look to the algorithm to know what we should do, we risk making decisions based on a system that is monetising our attention. But at least the content we experience through our phones exists in the world and depends on data in some sense, whereas if we look to our dreams to understand our desires it’s inward-facing and risks giving undue attention to something that is based on a random melange of memories.

So I ask you, in conclusion, to keep telling your friends about your dreams and a TikTok you saw, but don't let these hallucinations choose your life.

*Fictional examples

** If you go into your Google ad settings you can see who it thinks you are - try it, it's crazy!!

~

Text: Marianne Tambini

Published: 21/10/25