No one knows why we dream, but some scientists suggest that dreams are our brain’s way of making necessary emotional connections to new pieces of information. In other words, dreaming consolidates your recent experiences. As one scientist put it: “Dreams let you consolidate and integrate your experiences, without conflict with other input from real life. Dreaming is like saying, ‘I’m going home, disconnecting the phone, nobody talk to me. I have to do work.’”

Isolated from waking experiences, dreams can do their job.

Isolation Studies is a series by Chicago artist Chuck Jones based on similar insight. Other "isolated clip" pieces, dubbed “supercuts”, represent a new meme in which “some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.”

Supercuts can be as absurd as dreams. Just as your dreams (based on your experiences) make the most sense to you, supercuts might be more entertaining if you’ve seen the episode or film from which they’re taken. Regardless, these consolidations of larger works demonstrate an interesting way to make new associations with old, familiar experiences. I think they could inspire some absurd-but-entertaining ideas for our line of work, too.

Here are just a few of the hundreds of supercuts in circulation (some are safer for work than others).

• Turbo Boosts from Knight Rider
• Sawyer's nicknames for other Lost characters
• Pauses and silences from His Girl Friday
• All the times Steve Jobs says "boom" during his keynote addresses