Back in the Back of the Brain

Yesterday, just for grins, while driving, I tried voicing a detective story.  Just to see if I could.

And it came out.  Unrehearsed, unplanned, with a plot line and characters - I left off as the new female client was telling me about this creepy guy who had made up lies about her in high school, had reappeared in her life, was showing up, without a word, wherever she went, and just looking at her...

OK can't say it's very original, and it may even be unlistenably bad, but the point is:  where does that come from?  I was driving.  There was nothing in it recognizable from my past, at least nothing conscious... wait.  Maybe that's really the point.  The unconscious is what puts together a narrative, just as it does in dreams.

I think we explain all this on the basis that there is some kind of meaning behind the story.  We tell a story because we are trying to make a point.  But I am not persuaded that that's how the unconscious operates - I think the meaning comes later, we retell our stories and impose ideas by jiggering the plot. The unconscious just streams stuff out.  It's synapses firing.  It comes out in words because we know words.  And it isn't gibberish because there is some kind of superfast mental process saying yeah-now-what-happens-here-is-a-choice-I'll-follow-it playing out in the background as the words are coming out - a logic, to that extent.

The good news is that they will never make a machine that can do that.  The old query was whether androids dream.  Maybe so, but I don't see how they ever will just riff, free-form, make up stories from the air.