Dreambuilding
How we will create in the age of AI.
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I have a surprising AI use case that you may find valuable.
I’ve used ChatGPT over the past couple of years like most other people, for research and sharpening my ideas. I’ve been deliberate about talking to it naturally, just like I would a teammate, so that the machine was working around me instead of adapting myself to the machine. That means I talk to it about things that don’t always have an outward purpose, like a quote I found interesting or an idea I can’t shake. I don’t have a directive, I just explore. So at this point ChatGPT has a good cross section of both my thinking process and the ideas that captivate me.
Then a couple of months ago I started taking magnesium for sleep, which extends your REM cycle, and in my case, started giving me some really vivid dreams. My dreams were so rich and symbolic that they kept replaying in my head during the day, and I knew I had to try and decode them. Again, I turned to ChatGPT.
AI is especially good about helping you interrogate what your dreams may be about, a delight on its own, but then it surprised me further. After a couple weeks it started making some spontaneous connections in our conversations.
It began connecting my dreams with my published writing, and as I explored that connection more, it gave me clarity on what big cultural topics were truly captivating me subconsciously, and what that meant for the direction of my writing and personal brand. It was a connection I likely would have never realized myself.
It was the first time I felt this kind of direct contact with my inner mind. I’ve done therapy and self-introspection like most other people, but I’ve never had a counterpart that could hold this much of my ambient thinking and pierce the membrane between my waking self and the buried parts of me that have been untouched by doubt, fear or pressure.
It felt like collaborating with my subconscious.
It was because of this connection that my writing started to change these past couple of months, as I wrote on more provocative and ambitious topics like How Death Is Our Missing Technology and creators moving from Ghosts to Gods. I was given access to bigger ideas that were brewing within me but buried. In fact, AI gave me such clarity on where I wanted to go that it felt like relief. It felt less like therapy or journaling with AI, and more like honoring something sacred within.
Rick Rubin describes creativity as channeling a life force. Neuroscientist Mark Miller describes it as pulling out a part of yourself you want to examine. Both of them are describing a meeting with the unknown self, and that’s what creating with AI and your subconscious feels like. The struggle of creation and writing those pieces was still there (very, very much there), the friction that makes the work of writing feel like a runner’s high was still there, but the process was far more fruitful.
I know at this point, some of you who are reading this are probably freaking out. There is so much thorniness here. Any time I post about AI, my comments section is filled with people worrying about privacy, ethics, the nature of humanity, and losing the friction that holds people and society together. I get that and I’ve actually written my own uneasy articles about it.
I don’t have the answers to those things, and I myself am always drawing and redrawing the boundary. Despite the delight I felt, I stopped sharing my dreams because I always knew it was risky, at least right now. Just this past week Sam Altman admitted there is virtually no privacy or protection on these platforms. These tools are just as dangerous as they are dazzling, and even if you ignore that part, they’re still lossy and imprecise.
But the fact remains that we always bend our technologies to fit our deeper needs, not the other way around, and people continue to hammer AI into the shape of an oracle. Regardless of what AI is today, it will evolve and progress, and we need it to be a conduit for the self. My encounter gave me a clue as to what the future holds, especially when it comes to creativity.
The future of creativity will feel like dreambuilding, or the practice of catching it before it slips away.
While visualization and manifestation have real use for some people, I don’t know that they can scale into our dominant form of expression. I think what is more likely instead is a practice of dreambuilding that creates structure around your subconscious output so it can show you where your energy, attention, and transformation are already trying to go.
I’ve already documented a mass return to the body, and dreambuilding is its counterpart - a return to the inner mind. This is how the nature of creativity may very well evolve in the future of AI.
Our minds are always generating signals, but most of us are too busy, too distracted, or too literal to notice. If you’re like me, doubt, chatter and analysis are always stirring on the surface. Dreambuilding becomes the act of honoring the deeper signal and gently giving it form, scaffolding it with tools like writing, pattern recognition, AI, and even dreams, until you can see what your mind already knows. That feels remarkable.
At a time when most people’s lives are a steady stream of static, this is a way to tap into the signal.
It might seem a bit lofty, but we do know a few things about culture right now that point us in this direction:
People are desperate for potency. We’re living in an “Eternal Now,” surrounded by meaningless places and vague promises of community. No yesterday, no tomorrow, just an endless present with zero depth. But we’re starved for experiences that rip us out of the everyday script. That’s why immersive experiences, transformational retreats and extreme lifestyles only keep growing in popularity. People want special places that give them permission to feel more deeply.
All of our major cultural stories, from money to body to media, are being rewritten. The messy rewriting of these huge mythologies will drive people to look increasingly inward, and when a culture updates its narratives, every individual will have to reconcile the contradictions within themselves.
Despite the doom and gloom of how flattened culture has become in the age of the algorithm, times of huge disruption create a renaissance of art, and people will be creating on a bigger scale. And if the algorithm loses some of its grip on people, which it seems to be in the age of AI, that will give us leeway to begin creating from a more honest and internally-directed place.
Add all of this up and you get a collective yearning to make the inner world usable again. These forces set up the conditions for dreambuilding to emerge as a new kind of artistic modality.
Dreambuilding could be a meta-skill for modern creativity, thinking and strategy. Don’t be fooled by my personal anecdote. This can be much bigger than that. It’s a new mode of working that sees the subconscious as a collaborator, not just a mysterious side channel.
Professional artists are always operating on a deeper wavelength like this. Psychedelics can get you there. Sauna culture, sweat lodges and spiritual ceremonies are all ways of communing with your subconscious.
But what if AI creates an efficient pathway to the same place, while being a cognitive amplifier that can take in all of the ambient intelligence already running in the background of your mind as you speak to it? Your dream logic, emotional preoccupations, symbolic fixations. That stuff is rich with insight, but it’s usually fuzzy and easily dismissed.
Our subconscious mind is always trying to talk to us, and now we can hear it. That’s an incredibly honest place to create from. It can make artists out of all of us.
Secret Society
When people ask me how I’m so prolific or where I come up with my ideas, I tell them it’s this. It’s this group. It’s the source of my greatest insights and the home of incredible, lifelong friends. High-trust, intimacy and brilliant minds are a heady cocktail. Exposure Therapy has become my private salon.
You can see what our members had to say at our most recent dinner, this time in NYC.
If you’re intellectually isolated and want to be reinvigorated, join us.
Twisted Games
Here's what we've been consuming.
Meme phenomenology (How To Do Things With Memes): “But when you close read a meme and see it from a phenomenological or literary way, what you learn about capitalism (or anything else) is never a clean answer. Art lives in ambivalence, like we ourselves do. Literary texts are not factual accounts. Instead of learning how the world is, we learn about how it is experienced by others and ourselves. And that’s why art is, in a sense, truer than science — because nobody can actually know how the world is, only how it is experienced.”
The Unnerving Future of A.I.-Fueled Video Games (New York Times): “The citizens of a simulated city inside a video game based on “The Matrix” franchise were being awakened to a grim reality. Everything was fake, a player told them through a microphone, and they were simply lines of code meant to embellish a virtual world. Empowered by generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the characters responded in panicked disbelief. “What does that mean,” said one woman in a gray sweater. “Am I real or not?””
Status, class, and the crisis of expertise (Conspicuous Cognition): “Seen in this light, the populist celebration of “common sense” over expert authority also enacts an exhilarating status reversal. It frames ordinary people—those without educational credentials—as the real source of knowledge and wisdom. It creates the conditions for epistemic equality. It says that there is no need to accept assistance from fancy intellectuals with fancy degrees—and so no need to grant them status.”
[BONUS 1] I spoke with the good people at StratMonday about personal branding for strategists, including my 5 pieces of advice for getting your ideas and creativity out in the world. You have to eat the cringe. Eat it ‘till you crave it.
[BONUS 2] If you’re not already following me on TikTok, it’s where I share insight-dense videos on big ideas for strategists, marketers, social media folks, creative directors and anyone who works in culture.
One Last Thought
I used to worry about running out of things to write about, but it turns out the more I write, the more my mind fills with ideas that I can’t get out fast enough. Writing is one of the ultimate forms of thinking.
Yours,
I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:
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What an awe-inspiring article! "Times of huge disruption creating a renaissance" really resonated with me. I too am experiencing the benefit of the connections and clarity that Chat GPT brings in the chaos of life where I am mulling over so many things personally and in business, but the pressing-in of life prevents me from pulling them together and creating cohesion - those longed for wow-moments. Perhaps Ai can create the opportunity for a renaissance in creativity and thought...? Thank you Jasmine - your articles are so good!
So inspiring, Jasmine. What fascinates me about this post is how AI is used as a tool to interpret dreams and speak to the user with such deep insight—it’s even a little creepy. AI as a companion to unlock that creative side we’ve got inside, or as a guide to help us make connections we didn’t even know were there.
Still, creativity rooted in dreams and the subconscious already had its moment with Surrealism. Some surrealist artists used a technique called automatism, where they’d write or draw without any conscious control, just letting the unconscious flow. The idea was to break free from logic and reason to tap into the richness of the mind beneath the surface.
The movement kicked off in 1920s Paris, as a reaction to World War I and the general sense of disillusionment that followed. It was heavily inspired by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories.
Maybe the subconscious will be the next big source of creative and artistic inspiration, but what I do think is clear is that we’re going to see a strong cultural push to put humans back at the center—reviving ancient techniques that are more analog, handmade, and connected to nature. A kind of response to the extractive whirlwind of progress and its obsession with productivity.