" Erik Hoel hypothesizes that dreams function to prevent “overfitting” of the brain to its conditioning, allowing it to generalize from past experiences to novel future scenarios."
When in a maintenance phase, if there is no incentive to do things right (like put the laundry away instead of leaving it on the bed) neglect and rapid degeneration set in.
"...making noise on purpose can jolt a system out of its rut." During times of disruption, generalists often adapt to emerging conditions faster than their specialist neighbors.