When I became the father of twin boys, I found myself suspended in a new kind of time — time measured not in days or deadlines, but in lifetimes.
Drifting in a sea of dreams about what their futures might hold, I began to wonder:
If I was dreaming dreams on their behalf, then what dreams had I inherited from my parents, and which were truly my own?
In that moment, I ceased to see myself as a captain of my family’s future and began to feel more like a confluence of currents, with dreams flowing through me.
I was no longer just having dreams — some of my dreams, I imagined, were having me.
Growing up, I absorbed certain dreams through osmosis: my father's admiration for public service, my mother's love of beauty, my country's dream of freedom.
Who would I be if not for this inheritance of dreams?
Who would anyone be if not for theirs?
Perhaps the better question is this:
What do we do with the dreams we receive?
Each generation must wrestle with the dreams they inherit: some are carried forward, consciously or not, and others are released or transformed.
That was always hard enough. Today, we must also grapple with the dreams that are increasingly suggested to us by invisible algorithms.
AI systems may not dream as we do, but they are trained on the archives of human culture.
Just as a parent’s unspoken dream can shape a child’s path, a machine’s projections can influence what we see as possible, desirable, or real.
As machines begin to dream alongside us, perhaps even for us, questioning where our dreams come from and remembering how to dream freely has never been more important.
Dreaming Freely
One of the most iconic episodes of dreaming freely took place just blocks from where I live.
In the summer of 1967, thousands of young people converged on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, rejecting the societal norms of their day for dreams of peace, freedom, and self-expression.
Some of those dreams were lost to excess, while others were co-opted by spectacle, or overcome by the weight of their own idealism. Yet many planted seeds that grew deep roots over the ensuing decades.
Several of those seeds drifted south, to the orchards and garages of what became Silicon Valley, where software engineers turned ideals from the counterculture into technology products.
Dreams of expanded consciousness shaped the market for personal computing.
Dreams of community became the power of networks.
The Whole Earth Catalog's "access to tools" became Apple's "tools for the mind.”
Today, many of those tools nudge us toward the embrace of dreams that feel genuine but are often in fact projected onto us.
As we embrace technologies born of generations that once dared to dream new dreams, we find ourselves ever more deeply enmeshed in the ancient process of intergenerational dream transmission, now amplified by machines that never sleep.
Embodied Archives
The transmission of dreams across generations has always been both biological and cultural.
Our dreams are shaped not just by the expectations we inherit or reject, but by the bodies that carry them.
This is because our genes carry the imprint of ancestral experience, encoding survival strategies and emotional tendencies. Traits shaped by stress or trauma ripple across generations, influencing patterns of perception, fear, ambition, and resilience.
Inherited dreams contain important information and are among the deep currents of longing that give life meaning: dreams of justice passed down by activists, dreams of wholeness passed down by survivors, dreams of belonging shared by exiles.
They can be gifts that point us toward better futures.
Like biological complexity, these dream currents layer and accumulate over generations, forming an inheritance of imagination as real as the color of our eyes. They echo outward into the stories we collect, the institutions we build, and into the AI models we now consult to make sense of the world.
What begins as cellular memory becomes cultural memory, and then machine memory, moving from body to society to cloud, and then back again into mind and body.
There’s plenty of excitement to be had in imagining how AI may one day help us unlock dormant aspects of the mind, opening portals to new forms of creativity.
But if we sever our connection to the embodied archives of our elders or the actual archives that contain their stories, we risk letting machines dream for us — and becoming consumers of consciousness rather than its conduits and creators.
Temples of Thought
Libraries are among our most vital connections to those archives.
For thousands of years, they have served as temples of knowledge, places where one generation's dreams are preserved for the next. They have always been imperfect, amplifying certain voices while overlooking others, but they remain among our most precious public goods, rich soil from which new dreams reliably grow.
Today, many of these temples are being dismantled or transformed into digital goods. As public libraries face budget cuts, and book readership declines, archive materials once freely available are licensed to AI companies as training data.
AI can make the contents of libraries more accessible than ever, and help us to magnify and make connections among what we discover. But it cannot yet replace the experience of being in a library: the quiet invitation to wander, to stumble upon the unexpected, to sit beside a stranger, to be changed by something you didn’t know you were looking for.
As AI becomes a new kind of archive, we need libraries more than ever — not as nostalgic relics, but as stewards of old dreams and shapers of new ones.
Just down the street, a new nonprofit Counterculture Museum has opened in Haight-Ashbury.
It preserves the dreams that once lived in bodies now gone or fading.
Those dreams live on in the museum’s archives.
They also live on in algorithms, where counterculture ideals have been translated into code that increasingly shapes how we dream.
Digital Dreams
Artificial intelligence models are now among the largest repositories of inherited knowledge in human history. They are dream keepers, and dream creators.
They absorb the written, spoken, and visual traces of countless lives, along with the biases of their designers, generating responses that mirror our collective memory and unresolved tensions.
Just as families convey implicit values, AI inherits not just our stated aspirations, but the invisible weight of what we've left unsaid. The recursive risk isn't merely that AI feeds us what we want to hear, but that it withholds what we don't, keeping us unaware of powerful forces that quietly and persistently shape our dreams.
Philip K. Dick’s 01968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? imagined a future San Francisco (roughly our present day, five decades after the Summer of Love) in which the city is overrun with machines yearning to simulate emotions they cannot feel.
His question — whether machines can dream as we do — is no longer sci-fi. Now we might reasonably ask: will future humans be able to dream without machines?
In some ways, AI will expand our imaginative capacities, turning vague hopes into vivid prototypes and private musings into global movements.
This could ignite cultural revolutions far more sweeping than the Summer of Love, with billions of dreams amplified by AI.
Amidst such change, we should not lose touch with our innate capacity to dream our own dreams.
To dream freely, we must sometimes step away – from the loops of language, the glow of screens, the recursive churn of inherited ideas – and seek out dreams that arise not from machines or archives, but from the world itself.
Dreaming with Nature
Dreams that arise from nature rarely conform to language.
They remind us that not all meaning is created by humans or machines.
"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake," wrote Thoreau, reflecting on how trees, ponds, and stars could unlock visions of a deeper, interconnected self.
This wisdom, core to America's Transcendentalist Movement, drew from many sources, including Native Americans who long sought dreams through solitude in the wild, recognizing nature not as backdrop but as teacher.
They turned to wild places for revelation, to awaken to dreams not of human making, but of the earth's.
When we sit quietly in a forest or look up at the night sky, we begin to dream on a different wavelength: not dreams of achievement or optimization, but dreams of connection to something much deeper.
In nature, we encounter dreams that arise from wind and stone, water and root, birdsong and bark.
They arrive when we contemplate our place in the wider web of existence.
Dreaming Anew
At night, after reading to my boys and putting them to bed, I watch them dreaming.
I try not to see them as vessels for my dreams, but as creators of their own.
When they learn to walk, I’ll take them outside, away from digital screens and human expectations, to dream with nature, as humans always have, and still can.
Then I’ll take them to libraries and museums and family gatherings, where they can engage with the inheritance of dreams that came before them.
When they ask me where dreams come from, I’ll tell them to study the confluence of currents in their lives, and ask what’s missing.
What comes next may be a dream of their own.
At least, that is a dream that I have for them.
The Inheritance of Dreams is published with our friends at Hurry Up, We're Dreaming. You can also read the essay here.
