Thread: A Theory of Dreaming

This post is going to be a little long. Sorry, just try to stick with me!

I was watching a PBS special about dreaming recently where they implanted electrodes in the brains of rats to monitor their "thought" processes, then had them navigate a maze where the intersections were distinctively marked. They recorded the rats' thought patterns, then waited until they were asleep. As the rats dreamed, their brains displayed patterns very similar to those that they experienced at the intersections in the maze, which means essentially that their dreams were (as humans' dreams are theorized to be) based on the events of their day. The memories were stitched together in random patterns, however, and often modified somewhat.

Later on, I was reading Oliver Sacks's book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. There is a chapter where he talks about a man with brain damage who cannot form new memories, so he continually confabulated new memories. That is, he hallucinated that the people he saw were people he had known before his brain damage. He believed that the doctor, in his white coat, was a butcher. I got thinking about various theories of dreaming, and I had a thought:

Dreaming consists primarily of the random activation of groups of neurons, leading to the recall of random memories, some from the day before, and other times from the more distant past. In order to preserve continuity, the brain confabulates connections between the randomly-recalled memories and experiences.

This would explain why dream plots are so frequently nonsensical: they're an attempt to connect unconnected experiences. As for how dream conversation can so often be nonsensical, my theory is that since both memory and language are primarily stored in the temporal lobes, maybe random activation of the language areas leads to confabulated conversations in which people can say strange things like "Yes, that's right...I am sexually inhibited."

Just some of my random musings. What do you think?