Babs2u
Senior Member
The former narrative that people only dream during REM sleep has been debunked. Researches now say people dream an average of 2 hours a night. My brain is unusual because I've never woke from sleep, even if just momentary say while reading a boring book, without being aware I was just dreaming. Am generally a light sleeper, easily awoken by odd sounds, a useful survival trait and useful when I wilderness backpack where bears prowl at night.
So even as a child have dreamed 100% of the time while asleep. Thus I have a significant part of my brain devoted to dream life that is ever only accessed while asleep. While awake, such the control brain areas dreams use is not accessible nor our higher awake mental processes we useful for complex decision making. Like I can feel a significant difference to parts of my mind being accessed. Dreams cause our executive control pilots to confabulate drifting about, morphing visually, within our inner mind memories. That is why other people in our dreams change so much from minute to minute.
Oddly my mother claimed she didn't dream while my father dreamed a lot and even sleep walked. Researches have found those that claim they never dream actually do sometimes but just never remember. I can only recall dreams if upon waking, I immediately try to recall what it was about and then am only likely to recall bits about the last episodes. Recall obviously has much to do with suppression of elements of brain chemistry necessary for memory.
People don't understand how we perceive the external world. For instance, that what our visual system perceives is what our eyes see or what our hand touch sense neurons feel. But that is an illusion because those senses are processed by intermediate brain structures before being sent to our inner brain reconstruction. Creature brains evolved to recreate their external world for survival advantages, not to exactly represent what the raw senses experienced. There is a part of the brain represented by homunculus graphics that is resident in our motor and sense cortex's.
Cortical homunculus - Wikipedia
Our sense organ neurons connect to those areas and that is where our aware perception occurs and not at the actual sense organs like our eyeball fovea, ear cochlea etc. Sort of like a dual ported memory structure. When we dream, the sense organ neural inputs from our senses to those cortex areas are inhibited so what we experience is just what are mind finds in that inner cortex. That is why dreams appear so perfectly like when we are awake because when awake that is the same substrate our electromagnetic brain wave fields are experiencing.
When one consumes hallucinogens that amplifies electromagnetic brain standing wave power levels, those inner substrate power waves can become so strong that to a minor extent they may overwhelm the sense organ inputs. It is obvious to this person the intensity amplitude level of awareness is directly related to those power levels, something neuroscience has not made a connection to.
Too much information for me this sleepy Sunday.