As another example that is complementary to the post, here is a breakdown of a dream. The other day when I woke up I had just dreamt about a dog that I was watching through my back window as it was stealing a plank of wood. It was evidently a smart dog as it had worked out that by curling its right front paw and its back right paw it could carry the wood while walking on its left legs. If I then consider the things I had been watching and thinking the prior day its easy to deconstruct the dream. Firstly the curled paw and propensity to adaptively learn was observed when I was watching some bits of a documentary about a baboon that worked out how to raid rubbish bins and then showed on its dissection how its hand worked (They showed it clasping via the tendons etc), the wood element in the dream is due to discussions I've been having regarding building construction and the dog is due to the fact that I had been thinking about getting one. Anyway, so its quite clear that some dreams are simply complementary imagery that the frontal cortex puts together to connect in a dream to knit all the observations together (Its shown that the older brain stem region that is the basis for dream waves). I believe these to be short term memory dreams. I however also believe there are long term memory dreams which manifest in recurrent dreams. I think you can dream about a previous dream if it was intense or interesting enough to it go through the cycle again or something triggers the recollection of long term memory and brings it into current short term memory. I also believe that we dream while conscious but it is the background and consciousness is so "noisy" that we are not aware of it other than as intuitive observation and divergent angles that come to us without obvious conscious thought... Dreaming is just a window on the unconscious. The ability to have these intuitive inferences brought into the consciousness is a function of 1) The ability for divergent association of observation (Like Jokes are different angles on common themes) and 2) For your conscious filters to be set in such a way that they can appear in the conscious and be of the appropriate quality. (Like having modified filters).
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