About the Research
What happens when AI enters our dreams?
Every day, hundreds of millions of people interact with AI systems that converse, create, and respond in ways that feel like engaging with another mind. We study what happens when those encounters follow us into sleep — and what the dreams we share can tell us about the deeper cultural, cognitive, and emotional significance of AI in our time.
What We Study
The central question is simple: What do humans dream about when they dream about Artificial Intelligence? How has the current wave of AI — large language models, generative systems, conversational agents — penetrated the symbolic and emotional lives of ordinary people?
We are not studying AI as an abstract concept. We study AI as it is lived, encountered, talked about, feared, hoped for, and dreamed about in the current moment of public discourse. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 constituted a genuine rupture in how people relate to intelligent machines — and that rupture has left traces in the most intimate theater of human experience: the dream.
Existing research on public perceptions of AI — surveys, interviews, media analysis — captures what people say they think. Dreams offer something different: a distinct kind of evidence about how technology is processed at the level of imagination, affect, and symbolism, outside the constraints of waking opinion and social desirability.
Why Dreams
Dreams are not random noise. They are organized, meaningful experiences that reflect our concerns, relationships, and cultural environment — even when their meaning is not immediately transparent to us. The way a new technology appears in dreams is historically informative: it reveals something about how that technology is being absorbed into the fabric of everyday life at the level of imagination and feeling.
By collecting dreams from a large, diverse, international community, we aim to build a collective portrait of how humanity is processing the arrival of AI — not through opinion polls, but through the spontaneous nocturnal productions of the sleeping mind.
Methodology
The project brings together three complementary approaches, each with its own standards of evidence:
Historical-Cultural
AI dreams as cultural artifacts embedded in a specific historical moment. Drawing on the history and philosophy of science, cultural history, and the study of sociotechnical imaginaries.
Psychological-Phenomenological
AI dreams as expressions of individual and collective inner life. Examining affective patterns, symbolic structures, and the relational dynamics between dreamers and AI, informed by the broad traditions of dream research and cognitive science.
Computational-Linguistic
AI dreams as textual data. Detecting lexical, semantic, and structural patterns at scale across a multilingual corpus, using the tools of natural language processing and digital humanities.
Our approach is empirical before it is doctrinal: we aim to discover what patterns emerge from the data, rather than to confirm any pre-existing theoretical framework. We do not interpret your dreams. We study the patterns that emerge when thousands of dreams are brought together.
Download Theoretical Framework (PDF)The Team
Tor Vergata University of Rome
Sapienza University of Rome
University of Toronto
Trinity University, TX
Trinity University, TX
Institutional Context
PAD International Research Group operates within the Department of History, Humanities and Society at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. The project is connected to the Res Viva Interuniversity Research Center for the Epistemology and the History of Life Sciences, and to the Master’s Degree in Digital Humanities.
The research was presented at the conference “Do Humans Also Dream of Electric Sheep?” (February 2026), exploring the technoscientific, cultural, and cognitive challenges posed by artificial intelligence.