Dungeon crawling or lucid dreaming?

My recollection begins at na office, clearly not a place I have been before, white walls, an L shaped room, long white messy desks full of computers and papers, but everyone in the room was known to me. They were my co-workers.

I remember talking about something I am upset about. I find that I am upset that they think my code is unacceptable. My colleague next to me keeps to his computer, clearly avoiding contact. Someone rises from the right of my field of vision carrying an opened notebook in his hand. He is the most senior programmer and asks me to accompany him outside. "Outside", he says. I am taken aback... "are you asking me to leave?" (like a teacher would ask a child that is misbehaving). Outside, he says again. I say "No! I can prove I am right!"

Suddenly me, this senior programmer and the guy next to me was entering a brightly lit, wooden room. I know I have been there before, but it is all different. I realise they turned the place into something like an old museum. My thought is that they did that to protect the project I was working on.

I walk past the same long desks as before, now wooden instead of plain white, but covered in paper just as before. I walk towards a desk attendant, a woman I can't exacly see the face. I ask to see the archives of 2016-2017. Now I can suddenly see her face, its expression of secrecy, looking around. She takes me by the hand, up some stairs, towards a somewhat hidden door. The set is now like a barn, there are many people around, but they all have their backs to me. It still feels like they are looking at stuff in a museum.

She tells me, before going through the door, that I must keep close, there are several monsters in place to protect the archive and if I look I might get scared and run off, getting lost in the halls.

Beyond the door there is a mesh of corridors, desks and chairs to either sides, disfigured, gray people sitting, like they were in a bar, talking. The mood is agitated, and as we run past I feel some of them jumping up. I keep staring at the wooden floor as we rush through the maze.

We finally arrive at a dead end corridor, separated by a wooden grid frame without any doors. Can exactly tell how long it felt we were running for, many minutes, maybe hours. There is a wooden desk with benches at either sides. She starts taking files from shelves and setting them at the table, as I notice there are wolves coming at us from the end of the corridor. I step through the frame and take a wand of my coat. I realise I am powerful enough and make some sort of dance by the end of which a blast of air sets the wolves running off the other way, scared.

I go back to the table and I tell her I am an Auror (yes just like in Harry Potter, when I woke up I found it so silly, but the feeling was cool at the time) and she tells me I should have told her before, impressed.

Before waking up a flash of scenes rush through, me sifting through code printed in those files and realising I connected magic with code, and that all my code was really working after all and that that is the way that actual magic work, through those code abstractions.

Looking back at the dream, it feels a lot like a neural network generated plot, with two differences. The first is that the scenery and plot seem to change less often, and the second is that even though everything changes, some artifacts from the previous dream iteration still remains, influencing the next scene.

I have other recollections and they all go a lot like this, many times the dreams taking me back to the same place as before, but with all the previous dream elemnts still present, in an never ending quest until I wake up.

It feels like we're close, but not there yet

One thing to consider, to further your thought exploration: it seems that in the human brain, both data and logic use the 'same hardware', i.e. storage and processing are reliant on the same physical structures. Memory, for all we know, is a factual impression whose topology is closest to giving it 'meaning'.

I picture it as having a mesh+distributed multi-CPU system, wherein CPU/core 'cache' is in fact all of memory (no 'external' RAM or cold storage, physically). Data seems sharded between CPUs, i.e. topology of neurons (notably diameter of 'network connections', axons and dendrites).

I can picture indeed chunks of data 'lighting up' and enabling some partial processing during REM / dreams. Another crucial observation, I think, is related to "EMDR" (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). It's both the natural way we deal with small traumas in our sleep, and has become a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences (think horrors of war, grave assault, etc).

This is purely mechanical and essentially helps de-correlate emotions from memory, i.e. you de-sensitize memory, learn to think about X without feeling the PTSD.

There is also a fundamentally "adversarial" discourse in the human consciousness: internally we both speak "as" and "to" ourselves, we freely move from "I" to "you" in monologue.

I don't have a proposition to tie all this. Just sharing food for thought.

Computers have been able to reason for longer than they've been able to dream, anyway.

The generated text might associate with what you type but there seems like 0% goals-as-such, 0% available choices-as-such, 0% dangers-as-such. Maybe you 10% "influence" over the random the thing spews but that doesn't seem 10% game even.

Edit: also, 0% constraints based on either passed actions or properties of things in the world. As others have noted, it will generally respond to the most obvious action of the scene with either a reason that action is impossible or some entirely unrelated.

Perhaps the thing could be trained to give a resource-print-out and then you'd have some idea where hard limits existed.