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From: bert@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Bert Hutchings)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: the surrealism of dreams
Message-ID: <347@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 4 Apr 89 10:11:38 GMT
References: <74@opmvax.kpo.fi> <10228@nsc.nsc.com> <1763@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Reply-To: bert@aiai.UUCP (Bert Hutchings)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 17

In article <1763@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William
Hopkins) writes:

> It is known among sleep researchers that the seemingly nonsensical quality
> of dreams arises because the medulla is sending out random signals during
> this phase of sleep, which the neocortex tries is damned best to weave into
> a logically consistent framework.

J.W. Dunne took a similar view in his book "An Experiment with Time".  The
dreaming mind is re-visiting segments of its past experience, but it has a
defective span of attention, so the segments are short and disjointed.  At
a later stage, a less dreamy mind fills in the gaps between the segments.
Dunne is intrigued that, searching for logical consistency, the gap-filler
will resort to almost any surrealism, rather than directly juxtapose the
segments.  He concludes that our subconscious holds on far more strongly to
a rule that "human beings do not travel instantaneously in time or place"
than it does to its general rules about the physical world.