With regards to the headline, the actual paper uses the same terms so it's not just journalists making things up to humanize AI. The paper introduces an "awake

With regards to the headline, the actual paper uses the same terms so it's not just journalists making things up to humanize AI. The paper introduces an "awake regime" and a "sleep regime", and "Dreaming neural networks" is literally its title. Whether that's an appropriately non-clickbaity name is a different matter, but they do try to justify the naming (they reference things like REM sleep as inspirations for the unlearning & consolidation components of the model) and it was accepted as-is into a legitimate peer-reviewed journal.