Wednesday, June 25, 2008

It's Only In Your Dreams



The brain is like a hard disk and the mind is like an operating system. When we sleep, it wanders along on screensaver.  It picks out data at random and reacting to our surroundings and our physical conditions, creates scenes out of our subconscious thought patterns and strings them together into a story.  That explains why we sometimes can even continue on a dream when we go back to sleep after getting up in the night.

Sometimes they resemble our past because it picks on images out of our vast store of memories.  Sometimes they piece together random images of people and places and they blend them together to become faces or places we’ve never seen or been before or an occasion we've never experienced at all or an event that's yet to happen or never happened at all.  Ever remember once in a while you're doing something or at some place and you thought you'd been there or done that?  Ever met someone you thought you'd met before?  Probably it's true, but it's only in your dreams.

That’s what a dream is all about.  I think.




Thanks to Bengbeng for triggering this thought process.

5 comments:

  1. Nice one...This is what I read about dreams somewhere...A group of test subjects were allowed to sleep , but they weren't allowed to dream (i.e their R.E.M was interrupted with minor electrical jolts), and later , cognitive skill tests carried out on them revealed that the subjects had a drop in performance in tests related to memory and recall.
    Scientists think that dreams are a way of defragmenting the brain and uncluttering it in the very manner that you have eloquently described it here...

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  2. Thanks, Vik & J. Now let's go back and dream more happy dreams...

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  3. I once had a dream about being trapped in a bunker with a loud piercing siren in the background, only to wake up to a bird singing outside my window. Some rogue algorithm is amplifying the sound and turning it into a storyline inside my sleepy head.

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  4. If they can come out with a computer to work like a human brain it'll still probably be HUGE. PC screensavers are so limited...

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