Dream Incorporation
What a dream about Drake taught me about designing products
Had the strangest experience last night that made me think about how we construct narratives in design.
I was dreaming and in that dream, “Blessings” by Big Sean ft Drake was playing. Then I woke up and the song was actually playing on my phone. I paused it at 1:37.
Turns out your brain does this thing called “dream incorporation.” When you’re asleep, your mind doesn’t fully shut off from the world around you. It’s still monitoring for sounds, movements, anything important. When my phone started playing that song, my sleeping brain heard it and wove it directly into my dream in real-time.
The interesting part is I can’t remember the dream clearly now, but I know it had something to do with the lyrics. My brain wasn’t just hearing music, it was actively processing the words, interpreting meaning, and building a narrative around what was being said. All while I was asleep.
It creates this seamless transition, building the dream around the music so smoothly I’d never know the difference. Your brain does this to keep you asleep: rather than jolting you awake at every sound, it tries to explain external stimuli within the dream world first.
This is exactly what we do in product design.
When someone uses a product, they’re not experiencing raw interface elements. They’re constructing a story about what’s happening, retrofitting explanations onto interactions, building coherence where there might be gaps.
Good design feels inevitable. Like the song that was “always part of the dream,” a well-designed flow makes users feel like they knew what would happen next, even when they didn’t. We’re creating those seamless transitions: guiding people through experiences so smoothly they never notice the seams.
But here’s where it gets complicated.
I can’t actually remember my dream clearly, yet I’m certain it related to the lyrics. Users do this too. They come to research sessions convinced about their past behaviour: “I always do it this way,” “I never click that button,” “This feature used to work better.” Then you look at the data and their memory doesn’t match reality at all. We’re all unreliable narrators of our own experience, constructing coherent stories after the fact.
And they arrive with existing beliefs that shape everything they see. Just like my brain incorporated the song into a narrative that already made sense, users incorporate their experiences into stories that confirm what they already think. “I knew this would be complicated” becomes the lens through which they interpret every interaction, even the smooth ones. Confirmation bias isn’t just about what people remember, it’s about what they’re actively constructing in real-time.
Makes me more careful about how I interpret feedback. When someone says “this feels intuitive,” are they describing the interface or the story they’ve built around it?
Then there’s the seamlessness problem.
My brain worked so hard to keep me asleep that I never knew the song wasn’t part of the dream initially. It masked the disruption so well I experienced it as continuous. We do this in design too, sometimes too well.
Beautiful interfaces can paper over real usability problems. The aesthetic usability effect means people forgive friction in products that look good, assuming the fault is theirs, not the design’s. We create such smooth, polished experiences that users never “wake up” to the fact that something’s actually wrong. They stay asleep, navigating broken flows while their brain constructs explanations for why it makes sense.
When does “seamless” become “deceptive”? When are we helping people stay in flow versus preventing them from seeing what’s actually happening?
If the brain is already working this hard to make sense of the world, the least we can do is give it something coherent to work with. But maybe we also need to know when to let people wake up.