This is not a theory; it's a request for a theory of how dreams interact with the sleeper's environment.
In this night's pretty-vivid dream, I found myself at a high school reunion. What brought me there was an unexpected, even implausible turn of events that I don't remember any details about. At the reunion, some of the attendants were smoking pot. In the middle of mingling, I woke up---the pot smell was still there in my bedroom. But I now noticed it wasn't pot smell, it was skunk smell. I immediately closed the windows because it was intense. The stink must have been lingering for quite a while.
The dream itself isn't remarkable. What's remarkable is what this says about the part of the brain that produces the world of our dreams.
- It pays attention to the sense organs sending information to it.
- It produces the most plausible interpretation of the sense data, given the setting within the dream. (There are no skunks at a high shool reunion, so it must be pot.)
- It probably re-routes the dream's storyline, throwing sleepers into settings where their sense data has a plausible interpretation, and obscuring any inconsistencies in the way it got them there.
Is there a literature on how this stuff works? Do our brains' world simulators play similar tricks on us while we're awake? I need a theory here!
