Two nights ago, I dreamed that I photographed an enormous rhinoceros beetle. The light was perfect, the horn gleamed, and I remember thinking it was the best picture I had ever taken.
The same night, a giant truck arrived at my home, loaded so full that it looked as if an entire house were riding on its back, and it began unloading everything into our place.
Last night, I stood on a golf course and made a hole-in-one and an eagle at the same time. (Golfers will note that on a par three, those are technically the same shot. Dreams are generous like that.)
None of this will appear in a history book. But each of these dreams is a story. Each has an image, a feeling, a turn of events and a meaning I am still trying to decode. And none of them existed anywhere in the universe until my sleeping mind made them.
This is what human beings do. Every night, without effort, without permission, without a data center, we create.
Literature Was Born in the Dark
Many of the works we now call classics began exactly this way: with a dream, a half-sleep vision or a private flash of inspiration.
Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unsure whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man. More than two thousand years later, that single dream is still debated by philosophers.
In 17th-century Joseon, Kim Man-jung wrote Guunmong, The Cloud Dream of the Nine, a novel in which an entire life of fame, love and power turns out to be a single dream. It remains one of the great works of Korean literature.
Mary Shelley said the idea for Frankenstein came to her in a vivid waking vision on a sleepless night in 1816. Robert Louis Stevenson said the central scenes of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came to him in a dream.
The old books we treasure today were, in many cases, the dreams of ordinary people who happened to write them down.
Mining the Past Versus Writing the Present
Today, the AI industry has a different relationship with books.
In a 2025 U.S. court case, it emerged that Anthropic had bought millions of print books, cut off their bindings, scanned the pages and discarded the paper copies to build a training library. The court found that this scanning of purchased books was fair use; the books were ordinary commercial copies, not rare manuscripts.
Legally, then, the practice was permitted. But the law answers only whether something may be done. It does not answer what it means.
What it reveals is a mindset: the book as ore. Something to be mined, refined into tokens and left behind as waste.
Extraction can only rearrange what humanity has already said. It adds no new memory to the world. It cannot produce the beetle, the truck or the impossible golf shot. Only a living person can.
The Largest Library Has Not Been Written Yet
By one well-known Google estimate from 2010, about 130 million distinct books have been published in all of human history.
Now consider this: roughly 8 billion people dream every night.
If even a small fraction of them wrote down one dream a year, a single page, they would produce more original stories in twelve months than every printing press in history.
These would not be great novels, mostly. They would be small, strange, personal and occasionally beautiful. A farmer's dream of rain. A child's dream of flying. A grandmother's dream of a husband long gone. An entrepreneur's dream of a truck bringing a whole house home.
But civilization has never been made only of masterpieces. It is made of accumulated human experience. And most of it, until now, has been lost each morning upon waking.
What Does Destroying Books Give Us?
So let us ask the question plainly. What does it give humanity, AI, the Earth and the universe to keep searching through old books, feeding them to machines and throwing the paper away?
For humanity, it gives convenience: faster answers drawn from what our ancestors already knew. But it subtly teaches us that our value lies in what can be extracted from us, not in what we can still create.
For AI, the gain is real but finite. The supply of high-quality human writing is limited, and researchers have warned that models trained increasingly on machine-generated text can degrade over generations, losing the rare and the unusual. What AI needs most is not more recycled text. It is a steady stream of new, genuinely human originality. Dreams are exactly that.
For the Earth, the ledger is uncomfortable. Training ever-larger models on ever-larger archives demands vast electricity, cooling water and hardware. A dream requires none of that. It is perhaps the most energy-efficient creative act in the known universe.
For the universe, the question becomes almost philosophical. As far as we know, this planet is the only place where matter has learned to dream. A dream that is written down is the universe recording its own imagination. A dream that is forgotten simply disappears.
From Readers of the Past to Authors of the Future
None of this means that AI should not learn from books, or that digitization is wrong. Preserving and studying the past is one of the noblest things a civilization does.
But a civilization that only mines its past is living on savings.
The healthier future is one in which AI helps people do what only people can do: remember their dreams, shape them into stories, illustrate them, translate them, and keep them, with clear authorship and the original intact, for the generations who come after.
In that future, AI is not a machine that eats libraries. It is a pen placed in the hands of 8 billion authors.
Write Down Tonight's Dream
Tomorrow morning, before the dream fades, write it down. One paragraph is enough.
It may be a beetle. It may be a truck. It may be the impossible shot you will never make awake.
Old books became precious because someone, long ago, decided their private visions were worth keeping.
The question for our age is not how many old books machines can read. It is how many new stories humanity is still willing to write.
DATAAD | Column
Machines can learn from what humanity has written. Only humanity can write what has never existed.