Thanks for the sensible article about dreaming. What interests me is that few people have considered that dreams are not likely to be narratives that we remember, but that a narrative structure is created from the sleep-brain activity by a waking/wakened mind. If I recall correctly, studies from the 70’s showed that when wakened during a dream and asked to recall immediately what was experienced, the reports were not of coherent narratives, but of chaotic imagery and experiences. Martin Seligman wrote a wonderful theoretical paper back in 1987 about all this ( Seligman, M. E. P. (1987). A reinterpretation of dreams. The Sciences, 27, 46-53.) I hope that this amazing paper gets revived, because recent interest by cognitive scientists in a less reductionist approach to consciousness/mind (e.g. Alva Noe’s Out of Our Minds) has made a space for Seligman’s ideas to finally be looked at seriously.So while it is obvious to me that dreams are things the mind does, what you have left out is the possibility that what we call a dream is a narrative constructed after waking, from brain activities that occur while sleeping.
Another equally interesting question, and one that has never really been answered, is why we sleep. Most animals do it, and yet no reason for it has ever really been ‘dreamed’ up.
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