How The Hell Do These Random Things Just POP Up In Your Dreams?

I had a very intense vivid dream... It went like this:

I put my hand through a rainbow..

Clown chasing us.

Luigi (from mario) morphing into a car...

How does this happen?! I'm not scared of it, it's really epic but just wondering. :shadewink:

No idea. Maybe that's just how the mind is natively and our thinking is just adapted to be more linear in our exoreality.

Gamma Rays?

I always believed that dreams are much like a reflection of the universe that we live in, and if you think about it, the universe is made of many random things. We try to put those random things in order, and sometimes things make sense and sometimes they won't. I don't see why dreams wouldn't be any different; where random things just happen. But if you look beyond those random things then perhaps you will be able to see certain patterns, meanings, and actions that are quite useful in your dreams and in your life. Give room to that randomness within dreams to be what it is, and at the same time, be observant as to the many possibilities that are within your reach.

Infinite Improbability Drive

I have random dreams too. Last night there was a car hanging from a string from my Grandma's ceiling and she said there was a guy in the mafia in it so we flew up to it and shot it down. Then the world was ending and people were getting on spaceships to go to Mars while I was asking my friend for weed. When I think about them, there are reasons I'd dream about them. I was talking to my friend about Dec 21 yesterday, and he smokes weed, and yesterday I heard something about people going to Mars in a few years. It's probably something similar with you. If you think about the things in your dream you probably saw them or talked about them in real life recently. But I can't explain the mafia car hanging from the ceiling...

In order to remember my dreams I think about the previous day and suddenly I will come across something that will trigger a dream.

Work...running from dog... driving home... watching TV... touched the counter! got it! it was because I touched the counter that I dreamed about the crazy cyborgs from under the earth coming and stealing all of our kidneys!

I do not know exactly how, but this has been a pretty effective way for me. After I find out what triggered the dream, the entire dream comes to mind it is weird.

I think dreams are just random neural firings, and our brain doesn't know what to make of them but it tries hard and strings them together or makes something out of them. I learned it in AP psychology and believe that is at least part of it.

I don't think anyone really understands why we have these random dreams, but I do think it just has to do with the things we experience in real life, and we have REM sleep because our brains are trying to organize our recent memories (correct me if I'm wrong). Since we usually have dreams during REM, it's often about our recent memories the brain is trying to sort. Am I making sense?

(I can't seem to edit my posts, I wanted to add this):

Why they're so random? I don't know that either, but it could have something to do with the fact that the frontal lobe of the brain is impaired while dreaming which usually throws logic out the window. This would also explain why you didn't ask yourself if you were dreaming when you saw Luigi morph into a car (or did you)?

I think the best explanation for ramdoms dreams is the concepto of Schemas

Look for "The Infinite Dimensions of Lucid Dreaming" by BillyBob that is just in this forum http://www.dreamviews.com/f14/infini...reaming-46571/
\

Quoting " How to Get It:

For three years I've tried to figure out how to achieve this type of realism. Finally, after all this time and all this searching, I've pieced it together.

To understand this fully you must first understand how I believe dreams are created.

I think it was LaBerge that first used "schemata" to explain how dreams are formed (don't quote me on that of course).
(You may want to look over the contents of that link before continuing)

Basically, what happens is that as your lying there sleeping an image will come up in your mind.
Lets say this is an image of a pencil.

Your mind will begin to build a scene around this image of a pencil using your subconscious set of schemata.
Lets say that when you think of a pencil you think that it should be sitting on a desk.
When you think of a desk you think of school.
When you think of school you think of that one hot teacher you used to have.
When you think of that teacher you think of how you used to always worry about getting an erection in her class.

Using these schemata, your mind has built a nightmare wherein your standing in that hot teachers classroom with an erection and everyone is laughing at you.


This is how all dreams are born and perpetuated. They use your deepest expectations of what "should be", then build a vivid scene and storyline around it.

I think I've got a fairly good idea why dreams are random from these articles:

- Activation Synthesis Model of Dreaming
- HowStuffWorks "Theories of Dreams"

Quote:

---

More recently, around 1973, researchers Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley set forth another theory that threw out the old psychoanalytical ideas. Their research on what was going in the brain during sleep gave them the idea that dreams were simply the result of random electrical brain impulses that pulled imagery from traces of experience stored in the memory. They hypothesize that these images don't form the stories that we remember as our dreams. Instead, our waking minds, in trying to make sense of the imagery, create the stories without our even realizing it -- simply because the brain wants to make sense of what it has experienced. While this theory, known as the activation-synthesis hypothesis, created a big rift in the dream research arena because of its leap away from the accepted theories, it has withstood the test of time and is still one of the more prominent dream theories.

---

Basically speaking, I think it's trying to say there are circuits activated during our REM sleep which has access to our emotions, sensations and memories and from there it pulls out random images. If we didn't try to make sense of it with our logical brain, it would have been even more illogical.