I don't buy the "understanding is hard". Also you'd have to characterize precisely what is so special about a unicorn. There are animals with 2, 3 .. things on their forehead. That doesn't make them special. What about pegasus. Or other invented beings of 50/50 blends (minautor, egyptian gods). We just have one particular model or animal qualities ingrained and 'enjoy' toying with a maximizing function of having both our traits and other animal traits. I'd love to see a cockroachman god figure.

I'd bet a thousands dollars that the underlying principles Deep Dreams uses to infer fractal and continuous images are the same we have in our brains.