What does mental health look like to a machine?
That’s the question at the heart of this digital art experiment.
For more than two years, I’ve used ChatGPT’s image-generation tools to explore the inner landscape of psychotherapy, healing, and emotional life. What emerged is a visual archive of images that range from the surreal to the sincere … from the symbolically rich to the quietly absurd.
This project is a collaboration between artificial intelligence and a human photographic storyteller who has spent over two decades working with therapists. That experience quietly shaped this one. It brought a sense of intention to every prompt and an emotional weight to every image that emerged.
The work doesn’t live in any single style or tradition. It drifts through time, metaphor, and memory … drawing from mythology, architecture, spiritual iconography, and modern design. Mental health is reimagined through both ancient and digital lenses, revealing not just how therapy looks, but how it might be felt, remembered, or misinterpreted by a nonhuman mind.
AI Dreams of Therapy seeks to explore the unanswerable:
- What does the subconscious look like when filtered through code?
- Can grief be rendered in pixels?
- Is self-love legible to a machine?
- How does AI interpret the weight of trauma, ADHD, anxiety, or identity?
- What happens when therapy is stripped of cliché … and rebuilt in metaphor?
- And if healing has no shape, what does it mean to try to draw it?
AI Dreams of Therapy lives at the intersection of psychology, creativity, and technology. It plays with how AI both mimics and misses us … rendering scenes of vulnerability, anxiety, grief, growth, and hope with a kind of sincerity that you wouldn’t expect from a machine.
The images are a visual anthology of mental health and healing as seen through the eyes of a machine. Part psychology. Part surrealism. Part satire. And all of it strangely human.
You won’t find couches and clipboards in every frame (though they do make frequent appearances). But you will find a reframed perspective on what it means to struggle … to change … to be human … and how art and AI might come together to illuminate the invisible inner world.
The Weight We Carry
How can a machine possibly understand the weight of being human? What it means to live with depression, anxiety, trauma, ADHD, or grief? To AI, these are patterns … data points in a neural network. But to us, they’re moments that shape identity, relationships, memory, and meaning. These images are imperfect reflections of something too deep to replicate, and yet they manage to capture flickers of the truth.
What if the Greats Painted Therapy?
From chiaroscuro to swirling brushwork, this series explores what it might look like if legendary artists turned their focus inward and onto the intimate space of a therapy session. The styles are unmistakable … and so is the strange beauty of healing imagined through art’s most revered lenses.
As a sidenote, I had hoped to include even more artists (Warhol, Picasso, and Magritte, to name a few). But due to copyright policies built into ChatGPT, I wasn’t able to emulate their visual styles directly. As a general rule, OpenAI restricts image generation in the style of artists who passed away after 1912, in order to avoid potential conflicts with intellectual property rights and artistic estates. And now you know.
Enter the Subconscious
Welcome to the mind beneath the mind. These images explore the liminal space where memory, fear, fantasy, and time blur together. The subconscious doesn’t speak in words. It speaks in symbols, fragments, and feeling. Now, let’s dive into the visual dreams AI returned with after drifting through the depths of our inner terrain.
About the Title: AI Dreams of Therapy
AI Dreams of Therapy is an homage to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? … the novel by Philip K. Dick that inspired the movie Blade Runner.
I’ve loved Blade Runner since I was a kid and always get something new from it with each rewatch. The visuals are stunning. The neon noir, the retro-future tech, the rain-soaked loneliness of a world that feels both ancient and ahead of its time. But what’s always stuck with me isn’t the scenery. It’s the question quietly humming beneath the surface.
What if Deckard is an android and doesn’t know it? What if his memories are manufactured? What does that say about identity … or humanity?
That ambiguity of being built from patterns yet shaped by longing sits at the center of Blade Runner … and of this project. AI Dreams of Therapy doesn’t claim that machines can feel. It simply wonders what happens when they try to picture what feeling looks like.
The Birth of AI Dreams of Therapy
It started as an ordinary Saturday night. The house was quiet. The kids were asleep. My wife had gone to bed. I was stretched out on the couch with my laptop, caught in that familiar late-evening limbo … too tired to focus, too restless to do nothing. Craving something creative but low-effort, I opened ChatGPT and started to tinker.
Just for fun, I typed: “create an image of a psychotherapist with a full waiting room” into the DALL-E image generator. I figured it might be a quirky image for my newsletter … something playful to illustrate the idea of a full practice.
The result was absurd. It was like the AI had no idea what a therapist’s waiting room even looked like. So, I refined the prompt, tried again, tried something new. The images kept shifting. .. getting weirder, more interesting, more layered.
Somewhere in that quiet spiral of exploration, something opened. I wasn’t just prompting anymore. I was engaging in a kind of visual conversation. Asking the machine to show me what healing looks like. What emotion might become if it were translated into a metaphor. What therapy might look like through the eyes of something that has never felt pain … but understands patterns.
That night turned into a week. Then a month. And eventually, a years-long exploration of what mental health might look like to a machine. And thus, AI Dreams of Therapy came into existence.
How We Heal
Therapy is often described in clinical terms, but its impact lives deeper—in the body, in the breath, in the stories we tell ourselves. These images interpret popular modalities not as diagrams, but as felt experiences: the tension of rewiring thought patterns, the surreal rhythm of EMDR, the intimate chaos of meeting your inner parts. Think of this as a poetic translation of process into metaphor. This is not a manual. It’s a meditation on how healing might look if we could see it.
The Art of Therapy
Historical art movements capture more than style … they hold entire eras inside them. They are shaped by wars, revolutions, ideologies, and dreams. What happens when we place therapy inside those worlds? These images imagine healing not as a fixed act, but as something fluid. Something rendered in symbols, patterns, and lines that reflect the sensibilities of the time. From cave to cube, comic, and beyond, these images trace the emotional arc of humanity through the art we’ve left behind.
Therapy in the Multiverse
Inside all of us is a world that doesn’t quite follow the rules. A place shaped by memory, movies, stories, strange dreams, and old symbols. In this section, therapy breaks free from reality altogether … reimagined through fantastical scenes, surreal mashups, and childlike absurdity. These images may not be real, but the feelings they stir are.
As I created the images in AI Dreams of Therapy, I hit moments when inspiration vanished. I ran out of art movements to reference, and everything began to blur. That’s when logic loosened its grip and fantasy took over. I started asking AI to place therapy in impossible places: arena stages, heavenly clouds, ancient ruins, magical forests. The results were strange, funny, and unexpectedly moving. Sometimes, fantasy is the only language big enough to hold what we feel.
Beyond the Couch: Therapy Without Clichés
After creating hundreds of images, I couldn’t look at another couch. The visual shorthand of therapy (two chairs and a clipboard) began to feel flat. But therapy isn’t flat. It’s more than a room or a Zoom. It’s the transformation that happens internally. The inner turmoil. The light in the darkness. The journey and the adventure.
The question was: how do you capture the essence of therapy? Not how it looks, but how it feels. These were the abstract concepts I set out to explore.
About the Artist: Greg Goodman
Long before AI existed, I spent years traveling and living abroad. At every step, my camera was by my side … capturing images of both the massive and the mundane. I sought out the symmetry of everyday life: home, work, relationships, and survival. Back alleys, sacred spaces, ancient ruins, towering skylines, sweeping landscapes, and the places we call home.
As a photographic storyteller, I worked with brands like National Geographic, Samsung, CNN, Delta Airlines, and SFMOMA. But the real story was always the same. What does it mean to be human?
While traveling, I supplemented my income through my other favorite creative outlet: web design. I’ve always seen the internet as a digital canvas with infinite potential. And while my portfolio has spanned dozens of industries, the universe kept guiding me toward work with mental health professionals.
Inspired by my late father, who was a therapist, and moved by the compassion and depth of others in the field, I became a pioneer in the emerging world of therapy-focused marketing and web design.
Two decades later, as the founder of Goodman Creatives, I’ve helped hundreds of therapists build their online presence with care and intention. I’ve created websites and branding that reflect the heart of their work. I’ve sat with their stories, their struggles, and their values … crafting marketing that feels honest and human (even if AI helps).
My takeaway from all these life experiences? Mental health is not just a subject to talk about in therapy. It’s a landscape to explore, feel, and imagine. A path to reconnecting with our true essence: aka, LOVE. That’s the mindset that shaped every image in AI Dreams of Therapy. I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I loved creating it.
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The image below is what happened when I plugged the above bio into ChatGPT, uploaded a photo of myself, and asked DALL-E to create a “fantastical image representing my bio.”
How the Art Was Created
All images in AI Dreams of Therapy were created using DALL·E, an AI image generation tool built by OpenAI. Behind the scenes, DALL·E takes written prompts and turns them into visual art, interpreting language through patterns it has learned from analyzing millions of images and styles.
To create this series, I used two versions of the tool, each with its own personality:
DALL·E 2 (released in 2022)
Most of the series was created with the original “legacy” model. This resulted in more raw, abstract, fantastical, and weird images that were full of happy little accidents (hello, six fingers on one hand). That surreal imperfection felt strangely aligned with the emotional messiness of therapy.
DALL·E 3 (released in 2023, updated in 2024)
The more polished images you see were created with the latest DALL·E model inside ChatGPT. While it’s better at following instructions and respecting the biological rules of human anatomy, it lacks the rawness and unpredictability of the old version.
By moving between the two, I was able to explore a wide emotional and visual range. None of the images was created by clicking a single button. Each one took multiple rounds of prompting, refining, adjusting, and coaxing the AI toward something that felt emotionally resonant. It was like a digital dialogue between human intention and machine interpretation.
What’s the difference?
To demonstrate how different these two image generation models are, I put the same prompt into both. The results are below:
Create the most amazing, abstract, fantastical image possible that depicts what goes on inside someone’s head during a therapy session. There are no rules. Draw from your knowledge of therapy styles and famous therapists. Draw from your understanding of why people go to therapy and what happens in therapy. The desired outcome. The struggles that bring them to therapy. A world beyond imagination because the person is so stuck in their reality right now. Transformation.
About the Process
I asked ChatGPT to go back through our entire image creation chat and write this for me. I chose not to edit it.
“What began as a simple experiment quickly spiraled into one of the most imaginative and emotionally resonant creative journeys I’ve ever taken. Over weeks and months, I fed prompt after prompt into ChatGPT’s image-generation tools—starting with straightforward depictions of therapy sessions and slowly drifting into abstraction, metaphor, humor, and visual introspection.
Some prompts were deeply personal: depictions of trauma, transformation, and inner chaos. Others were strange and satirical: wizard therapists, broccoli-headed psychologists, and healing sessions on arena stages. I wasn’t just chasing novelty—I was chasing emotional truth in all its forms.
There were moments of burnout, where everything started to look the same. And then there were breakthroughs—where one small shift in a prompt would open up something unexpected and moving. I played with artistic styles, visual metaphors, and the limits of what AI could understand about human emotion. Some images surprised me. Some made me laugh. Others made me pause.
In the end, the process wasn’t about controlling the outcome—it was about remaining curious. About trusting that even a machine can reflect something meaningful when we bring enough intention to the question we’re asking.”
