Last night I dreamt I was in a professional workshop with some colleagues. All the other participants in the workshop were people I know in real life, either as collaborators or as potential collaborators.
The workshop itself was very entertaining, and people had lots of intriguing ideas. Of course it wasn’t until I woke up that I realized it had all been a dream.
The surprising thing was that even after I awoke, I felt that the idea that had been discussed in the workshop were work pursuing. I realize, of course, that all of those ideas were actually coming from my own brain, but I also think that those ideas were informed by my internal model of these particular colleagues.
So here we have something interesting: I internalized the thinking of smart people I know. Then I dreamt about cool ideas that, in my dream, appeared to come from them.
In a way those ideas did come from them. My theory of mind of those colleagues became tangled up with their own unique thought patterns, resulting in something different from anything they might actually have thought of, or that I might have thought of without their influence.
I wonder whether there something here to pursue. Perhaps lucid dreaming as an approach to collaborative research?