mass transientThu, Nov 29, 2007 There's a chapter E. O. Wilson's book Consilience (great book, by the way) about the neuroscience of dreams, and it boils down to this: when real stimuli are absent, the mind loses its connection to basic causality, but since the mind never really turns off, it has to invent events. That's partly why dreams are often so strange and surreal, because they're unchecked by realistic inputs. It's like negative feedback. So the mind starts drawing from all kinds of memory reservoirs...some shallow & common, some deep & arcane.
There's a chapter E. O. Wilson's book Consilience (great book, by the way) about the neuroscience of dreams, and it boils down to this: when real stimuli are absent, the mind loses its connection to basic causality, but since the mind never really turns off, it has to invent events. That's partly why dreams are often so strange and surreal, because they're unchecked by realistic inputs. It's like negative feedback. So the mind starts drawing from all kinds of memory reservoirs...some shallow & common, some deep & arcane.