(in progress 29 August 2025)
I posted a video of a dream simulation done by Steal Adcock on Tiktok and I got some weird comments which has prompted me to write a post about how the brain generates dreams and what can be said about dream content quite definitively. Some of the comments made me think that a lot of people do not dream or do not remember very much at all.
Dreaming occurs during a phase of sleep called rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM sleep for short. It is defined by the rapid movement of ones eyes back and forth laterally. We generally have about 3 to 5 of these periods of sleep each night. An infant has about 6 to 8 hours of REM sleep, and an adult has about 2 hours of REM sleep. The older you get the less REM sleep you have. Loss of REM sleep in the aged may be connected to short term memory loss as in Alzheimer’s disease.
https://justgeorgeous.net/alzheimersdisease.html
If you are deprived of REM sleep, you experience REM rebound the next night. This in itself suggest that REM sleep serves an important biological function. I will not go into what that function is here. You can access my other work which suggests that we dream to generate what we will be able to learn the next day, as well as consolidating recent memory and reducing obsession. I refer the interested reader to my book “Memory and Dreams: The Creative Human Mind” for details, published by Rutgers University Press 2002, and UNSW Press 2003.
https://justgeorgeous.net/memoryanddreams.html
All mammals have REM sleep, including the echidna, which was initially thought to be the only mammal not to have REM sleep. Other animals may experience a form of sleep that is similar to REM sleep. Once again, this tells us that REM sleep serves an important biological function.
During REM sleep, the brain is more active than when one is awake. There is more electrical activity and there is an increase of blood flow into the brain. Once again this suggest REM sleep has an important biological function.
Dreams are generated by random input in the brain stem which replaces visual and other sensory information when one is awake. These cells which stimulate the neocortex are called REM-on cells. I will come back to this shortly.
caption: During REM sleep the Amygdala, Hippocampus and Neocortex are stimulated by semi-random input from REM-on cells located in the brain-stem. These regions of the brain process this information as if it is visual, auditory and somatosensory input as when you are awake.
During REM sleep, the brain processes this random input. using your neurons and synapses (in other words your memories) and arrives at attractors which are processed almost completely internally. The output from the brain is not sent to your body because another group of cells, located in the brain-stem, called REM-off cell, stop that output from being enacted. A few signals are enacted. I will come back to this too. We know this because, we removed these REM-off cells in a cat and while it was dreaming, the cat acted out its dreams jumping all over the place. the actions of our dreams may well be impeded so we do not hurt ourselves (or our partners) while we dream sleep. The few things that remain active during REM sleep are your eye movements, of course, some finger movements, and your sexual organs. The latter, led Sigmund Freud to suggest dreams where highly integrated with sexual fantasy but we now know that this is not entirely true. Freud attached too much significance to the sexual nature of dreams. The fact that many of our dreams are related to sex may have something to do with the fact that as these areas remain intact during dreaming they might initiate sexual dreams. The situation is very similar to my theory about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The dreams influences the body and the body’s environment influences the dream.
caption. Dr Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis
As the brain is processing the input from the REM-on cells during dreaming as if it was input from your usual sense, these dreams should appear quite natural but as the input is semi-random, they would appear to be quite bizarre. In any case they are processed by your brain (or its neural networks) so they will be related somewhat to you own memories. You dream about your memories and I dream about mine.
Memories in the brain are stored in common areas sharing neurons an synapses. A natural mathematical consequence of this is that you brain also contains memories which are combination of these stored memories, so you may excite such so-called spurious memories. You may dream of a monkey eating an orange driving a bus for example.
In any case, as you brain is processing this input as if it is arriving from your eyes, ears, body, etc. it should appear quite natural. In other words like a first person experience. Almost all of my own dreams are exclusively a first person experience. Some people on TikiTok (TT) were adamant that I was wrong and that dreams were in third person only. I dispute this strongly, as I have often awoken while I am still dreaming and I am talking to whomever in my dream as I awake. I am actually speaking as I wake up. A few of my dreams may be in third person but this is very rare. What I believe is happening here is that a lot of the people who claim they are dreaming in third person, are either not very “conscious” during dreaming, so do not remember much or watch movies all night and dream as if they are watching a movie. As I am a lucid dreamer and I am often quite conscious and lucid in my dreams I recall very well what I am dreaming about and I assure you almost all my dreams are adventure to me in a first person experience. It is also true that some people do not even dream, or that is to say do not remember their dreams at all, and I suspect this may be the case with a lot of the Tiktok objectors. My DNA, Francis Crick proposed with Graeme Mitchison, that dreaming is a reverse-learning process, and tis is why we do not remember our dreams when we wake up, unless we go back into them backwards in our heads when we wake up, and they fade away very quickly from memory. Being very lucid or conscious in my dreams means that I remember a lot more of my dreams. I have even been so lucid in some of my dreams that I am telling people in my dream that we are all in a dream.
Some other comments I got from people on TT were that you cannot see yourself in a mirror, you cannot see your hands or you cannot read. I say rubbish to this, because I have experience all of these things in my dreams and there is no reason why they should no be in my dreams at all. Once again, I put this down to the fact that these people are not very lucid in their dreams and do not recall much, or maybe they are just repeating hearsay.
I just awoke from a dream where I saw a man chasing another man in a lake. they were floating with something they were holding. The man chasing the other was never able to catch the other man, so I tried it, and saw it was impossible, but then the other mans tarted chasing me. I was equally evasive, but in the end I got sick of the dream so I woke up and I stayed awake for short while (10-20 seconds), but as I closed my eyes I slipped back into that same dream, which was wearing a bit thin and monotonous now, so I woke myself up for a few minutes to remove this dream from my head complete. I then got up and wrote this paragraph, so tell you about it and to say how intensely first person in was for me. Even when I first viewed these people chasing each other, I, and I alone, was observing as I would in real life. My dreams are always usually like this and this fits in with my understand of how dreams are generated. MY brain, and my brain alone, is generating these dreams. Even though I was partly lucid, I was still tricked by my dreams. This is also the case when I am completely lucid in a dream. I can still be fooled even if I know it isa dream.
One thing I can say about dreams is that there is no pain. Pain is a form of consciousness that seems to be absent in dreams. I have heard this, and I know this personally as I had a condition called reflex sympathetic dystrophy (it is called complex region pain syndrome these days). I had the mots intense imaginable pain in my left foot, which could not even be turn off completely with a lumbar sympathectomy. It is regarded my medical doctors as the most severe pain one can experience. so I guess it is more painful than child birth. Hehe. I could not touch my left foot. I had to sleep with my foot hanging off my bed for close to one year. Anyhow, during my dreams I had absolutely no pain. It was as if I did not have this disease at all. I had the disease for over 10 years and it still persists today, although it has de-intensified and spread through my entire body. This is why I dis like the new name for it, as it is not regional as all, not for me. Roughly speaking it is a dysfunction of the sympathetic nervous system which controls blood flow, body temperature and pain. I dislike the name RSD a bit too as it suggest a something is going wrong in sympathy. It is just called the sympathetic nervous system. The name I like best was “crazy pain syndrome” which is the name my physician, Dr Evan Owen, liked to use, and best sits with my own mind. I recall some doctors suggesting it was in my head, to which I responded, yes, it is in my head. All pain is in my head. It is my head that projects the pain to my limbs and elsewhere, and in any case it still hurts. The fact that I was able to turn it off during REM sleep told me that indeed it was in my head but then again, all my conscious experiences are in my head. ### RSD