Oct 7, 2025 10:13 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 8, 2025 05:13 AM by Magical Realist.)
Many scientists claim dreams are just the frontal lobe's interpretations of the random synaptic firings of the back of our brain. While that may be true somewhat, I disagree in that I have over the years experienced repeated places that I return to many times in my dreams. One of them I dreamed of last night again is this big beautiful university located in San Diego where I returned to buildings and a dormitory and a museum where they used to display a gigantic blue and black painting I created of the crucified Jesus. Alas they have since taken it down. lol But that I keep returning to this dream place suggests to me no mere random free associating of random noise going on but rather a very complex and enduring structure existing in my spatial circuitry much as real life places do. Here's a theory I found about that that makes some sense of this:
"A curious limitation of visual imagery in dreams has not been noted, as far as I know. We always experience a visual dream upright, regardless of how our heads are positioned while we dream. In normal, wakeful vision, our sense of which way is “up” changes as our head moves and turns in space. That dreams are not like this is self-evident. If you lie with your right ear on the pillow, your dream should be tilted 90 degrees, but this is not what happens. It feels upright.
To me, this suggests that we do not just carry on “seeing” with our eyes closed during dreams. Nor are dreams just snippets of daily experience, some of which would necessarily be tilted. Instead, dream imagery seems to operate in an abstract space of knowledge, and understanding that discounts what our bodies know about their position in space, during both dreams and wakefulness.
The uprightness of dream imagery is related to one recent proposal of the purpose of dreams. Consciousness researcher Erik Hoel argues that our lives are rather predictable, and we need the seemingly random experiences of dreams to help us generalize our knowledge beyond what we have already seen. He takes as inspiration the current trend for comparing brain operations to “deep learning” artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Though they can be trained to perform certain tasks like detecting faces in an image almost perfectly, these computer systems are notoriously prone to getting stuck in a rut. They may perform extremely well in contexts they have seen before but fail utterly when faced with the unfamiliar. An object that the system previously recognized with no problem in thousands of previous images may fail to be identified when the object is in a context never seen before, or when parts of the object are blocked by other objects. In these situations, improvement can be gained by shaking up the AI and feeding it random images for a while. The random images serve to nudge the system in new and previously unexplored directions.
Hoel argues that dreams do something similar for our perceptual systems. Random dream imagery, produced by random neural activity, serves as a kind of offline training program for our perceptual systems so we are more ready for things we haven’t yet experienced during wakefulness. All this should happen in an abstract space of idealized objects rather than based on snippets of sensory input, which don’t necessarily take account of where your head is currently pointed. The fact that dreams are always upright was not noted by Hoel but is consistent with his proposal.
Dreams Can Repeat
However, there is one crucial fact about dreams that is usually ignored: This blind spot afflicts Hoel’s hypothesis, as well as most other neuroscientific theories about the purpose of dreams. We ignore the fact that they can be highly repetitive. Dreams that recur in seemingly minute detail are common—and they can be terrifying. People with posttraumatic stress disorder are known to experience intense periods of REM sleep and highly repetitive dreams. War veterans report having the same dream about battle experiences long after the events. This is a problem for Hoel’s idea: If dreams are the result of random neural activity, the chances are vanishingly small of generating the same pattern more than once across millions or billions of neurons.
Dreams Are Weird, and Not Just in the Ways We Typically Notice
We may never be able to understand why we dream specific imagery or experiences. But accurately assessing the perceptual characteristics of dreams may help us understand why we dream at all. From this perspective, we can see that dreams are still decidedly weird, but in interesting and potentially informative ways.
We can also take an evolutionary view. We can ask: What other species have dreams? When might dreams have first appeared in evolution, and what does this tell us about our dreams?"
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...-you-think
"A curious limitation of visual imagery in dreams has not been noted, as far as I know. We always experience a visual dream upright, regardless of how our heads are positioned while we dream. In normal, wakeful vision, our sense of which way is “up” changes as our head moves and turns in space. That dreams are not like this is self-evident. If you lie with your right ear on the pillow, your dream should be tilted 90 degrees, but this is not what happens. It feels upright.
To me, this suggests that we do not just carry on “seeing” with our eyes closed during dreams. Nor are dreams just snippets of daily experience, some of which would necessarily be tilted. Instead, dream imagery seems to operate in an abstract space of knowledge, and understanding that discounts what our bodies know about their position in space, during both dreams and wakefulness.
The uprightness of dream imagery is related to one recent proposal of the purpose of dreams. Consciousness researcher Erik Hoel argues that our lives are rather predictable, and we need the seemingly random experiences of dreams to help us generalize our knowledge beyond what we have already seen. He takes as inspiration the current trend for comparing brain operations to “deep learning” artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Though they can be trained to perform certain tasks like detecting faces in an image almost perfectly, these computer systems are notoriously prone to getting stuck in a rut. They may perform extremely well in contexts they have seen before but fail utterly when faced with the unfamiliar. An object that the system previously recognized with no problem in thousands of previous images may fail to be identified when the object is in a context never seen before, or when parts of the object are blocked by other objects. In these situations, improvement can be gained by shaking up the AI and feeding it random images for a while. The random images serve to nudge the system in new and previously unexplored directions.
Hoel argues that dreams do something similar for our perceptual systems. Random dream imagery, produced by random neural activity, serves as a kind of offline training program for our perceptual systems so we are more ready for things we haven’t yet experienced during wakefulness. All this should happen in an abstract space of idealized objects rather than based on snippets of sensory input, which don’t necessarily take account of where your head is currently pointed. The fact that dreams are always upright was not noted by Hoel but is consistent with his proposal.
Dreams Can Repeat
However, there is one crucial fact about dreams that is usually ignored: This blind spot afflicts Hoel’s hypothesis, as well as most other neuroscientific theories about the purpose of dreams. We ignore the fact that they can be highly repetitive. Dreams that recur in seemingly minute detail are common—and they can be terrifying. People with posttraumatic stress disorder are known to experience intense periods of REM sleep and highly repetitive dreams. War veterans report having the same dream about battle experiences long after the events. This is a problem for Hoel’s idea: If dreams are the result of random neural activity, the chances are vanishingly small of generating the same pattern more than once across millions or billions of neurons.
Dreams Are Weird, and Not Just in the Ways We Typically Notice
We may never be able to understand why we dream specific imagery or experiences. But accurately assessing the perceptual characteristics of dreams may help us understand why we dream at all. From this perspective, we can see that dreams are still decidedly weird, but in interesting and potentially informative ways.
We can also take an evolutionary view. We can ask: What other species have dreams? When might dreams have first appeared in evolution, and what does this tell us about our dreams?"
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...-you-think
