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Hands in Human Dreams Look AI-Generated
It’s fun to see the surprising images of human hands produced by generative image models. Why are there so many fingers — or so few? It turns out that this issue may not be unique to AI. Today I learned that the dreaming human brain also has trouble generating images of five-fingered hands.
I was reading about dreaming for a writing project I’m working on and stumbled across this comment on Reddit:
I find the best method [to lucid dream] is to randomly throughout the day is to look at your hands and count your fingers. Youll tend to do it in a dream and by the time you get to the 4th finger youll realize its a blurry mess of 5–6 fingers.
KneeDeepInTheDead, Reddit, 11 years ago
As soon as I saw this I thought about generative models and their issues with fingers, so I tried to find out whether other people have reported this same phenomenon in their dreams. I couldn’t find any formal scientific studies on the topic, but there are a bunch of random people on the Internet who claim that their sleeping brains generate unusual hand images:
This article: “It’s extremely rare to have 5 fingers in a dream. Most of the time, your hand will directly look really weird and it will be obvious that you have more or less than 5 fingers.”
This thread: “I generally have 6 fingers on each hand in my dreams. I have no idea why. They also look sort of misshapen… kind of squiggly, I guess. Trust me, if you look at your hands in your dreams, you’ll know its a dream.”
This WikiBooks article: “I counted my fingers. It looked as though I had the right amount, but as I actually counted them, I discovered that I had seven the first count, and six the next.”
This article on Why AI-generated hands are the stuff of nightmares says, “These models are divorced from reality, they don’t have any context and they don’t actually have any knowledge or ability to consider the context…
