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:
