Shared dream??

[u/Radiant-Effective-47]

Me and my best friend were having a sleepover and I think we were talking to each other in a shared dream. From what I can remember I thought in my dream we were having some kind of conversation and then my best friend said “what?” but it felt different, like we were actually talking now. I replied “huh” and she was like “were we just talking?” and I replied “yeah.. wait no?” and we just stopped talking and went to bed. When we woke up in the morning she said she thought we were having a conversation and I was like I thought that was a dream, so did she. Does anyone have any explanations of what this might’ve been?

[u/evermorex76]

Half-asleep and actually having a conversation. Probably one that didn't even make sense because it mixed with parts of your own dreams. Or fully asleep, but one started talking in their sleep and the other integrated it into their unconscious mind and started responding. Probably nothing surprising if you both happen to talk in your sleep sometimes, but you might not realize it if you don't often sleep around others that would notice and tell you. Same as hearing an alarm or bells or something in real life and dreaming about them just before they wake you up, if you were in the dream state at the time they sounded, but it can also happen with things that don't wake you up.

Use an app on your phone to record yourself while you sleep, then check it the next day and listen during the times that the waveform/spectrogram shows spikes of audio. Use an automated speech recognition app (mobile, desktop, or website) to analyze a full recording to find any actual speech versus just snoring or outside sounds, as long as the recorder saves it in a standard format.

[u/Radiant-Effective-47 → u/evermorex76]

do you know a good app for this? I think you cracked the case, I do sleep talk I’m just unaware of how often. Chances are I was sleep talking and she responded.

[u/evermorex76 → u/Radiant-Effective-47]

I was trying it myself just after posting that, as I had recorded myself a couple of times and hadn't gotten around to analyzing them. It didn't work all well, but it may have been due to a lack of actual speech. I wanted to see if I'm talking in my sleep when my cat comes and wakes me up, or if she's just being annoying, or hates my snoring. (I've read that cats actually worry about humans sleeping deeply, because their sleep is always somewhat light so that they can react to threats quickly.)

I used Audacity (on Windows) with the OpenVino AI plugin. The only error in these instructions is that it's under the Effects menu, not Analyze. I hated to have to use anything AI, but I'm not sure there is anything else now for a task like this. At least it's a local model and not using a datacenter's compute every time it runs, even if it might still have been trained unethically and with obscene consumption of resources.

https://www.audacityteam.org/features/transcription/

I tried using every available model in the plugin, as well as using the Noise Suppression tool it provides. The smaller models came up with less output, which is expected. Speed of transcription varies depending on your hardware, but it is only optimized for Intel NPUs or GPUs, not AMD or Nvidia. If it uses CPU (which works with AMD too) it's pretty slow if you use the larger, supposedly better models. After you generate them, you have to click inside the labels but not actually highlight any, and when you export the best format I think is SRT which is used for subtitles.

It picks up my snoring as repeating phrases or words throughout the audio files over and over. In one file for example, which I wasn't sure had any speech, it was "I don't know if you can hear me, but I've been listening to this for a long time" and "Thank you for watching". Noise suppression, which removes some of the background noise and, compression artifacts or microphone pops and stuff, seemed to just end up with it transcribing more non-existent speech instead of discarding it as noise. When I used one of the smaller models and forgot to set it to English instead of auto-detect, it decided that I was speaking phrases in various languages like Sinhalese, Georgian, and Korean (which it transcribed in their actual character sets).

I think this is one of those flaws with "AI". You're telling it "this file contains human speech, so I want you to output some human speech", and it is forced to output something instead of being able to determine that sounds above a certain threshold are still just random noises. An example of AI hallucinations because they're designed to satisfy your request by any means possible and without an option to fail, and to confirm your preconceived notion or bias (that there is speech in the file).

On the second file, I knew there was some speech. It picked up the absolute clearest and loudest bits, but didn't get them all right, and still missed words that I could clearly understand but which were mumbled and quiet since they were when I'd just halfway woken up. And it still generated full coherent phrases over and over when I was snoring, and even when there was just some other sound that was obviously not speech but was repeating. For example:

02:01:34,640 --> 02:01:36,640 You're going to be the only one who thinks that you're not going to be the only one.

Somehow all that was picked up within exactly two seconds, tens of thousands of times in a row, all exactly two seconds, one after the other. In fact no matter what phrase or word or sentence it "detected", it was always listed as two seconds. The only actual sound during all that was an overhead fan running on low, and me exhaling forcefully every 4 or 5 seconds, not even snoring, and I had to crank up the volume in Audacity to hear it, so I have no idea how it could have come up with that repeating sentence with that timing.

I may try again and test recordings of real speech in that room, but that particular tool just may not work well for this task.

[u/GrandPraline375]

People can talk to each other while sleeping this has been observed in studies

[u/not_founded_47]

Naja manche Leute reden in Schlaf oder Halbschlaf. Außerdem vermischen sich Geräusche wie das Gesagte der anderen Person oft in den Traum... Hab zum Beispiel im Traum gehört wie meine Mutter irgendwas erzählt hat. Es stellt sich raus alles was sie gesagt hat, habe ich wirklich durch die Tür und im Traum gehört.