Do people dream of homeostatic field dwellers?
Whoever defines the word ‘dream’ will win the argument. Some say dreams are only the fantastic (or terribly dull) imaginative story-ish sequences we have at night, whether we remember them or not. Many believe this is the mechanism by which the brain does its ‘information filing and body healing’ etc that Girl#2 is talking about. I know you are asking ‘is there proof that REM sleep = dreaming’, but the way it’s worded above gives me the feeling that the girls are simply not on the same page when it comes to the simple definition of what a dream is. I could probly argue they are both correct.
This is a truly semantic argument undermined by a lack of understanding of the mechanisms of dreaming. Girl #2 is basically arguing that if you do not recall your dream, then you did not have it. My personal belief is that the narrative of our dreams is only constructed during the time when we are conscious and that what we think of as remembering a dream is actually applying semi-logical semi-coherence to the brain activity that occurred while asleep. What makes this fascinating to me is that you can extrapolate the idea to our very idea of self-consciousness even while awake. Our brains are order-imposing, pattern-discerning machines. We attempt to apply this to everything around us, including the brain activity while asleep that stimulates our cognitive processes.
Just to clarify, I mean to say that the lack of understanding of the mechanism of dreaming is universal, not on the part of the arguers. That being said, I have to take issue with both koeselitz and languagehat, though they both seem to agree with at least parts of my assessment. I would tread lightly into using a mind/body dichotomy to discuss a scientific analysis. All processes in living creatures are physical. All else is outside the realm of science and into religion. And I think the only meaningful way to discuss dreams is to discuss our recall of them. It goes back to the tree in the forest. Is the sound the wave, or the perception of it. The wave is a physical process. The sound is our brain’s interpretation. Something happens in REM sleep. Our experience of dreaming is only available to us as a memory when we regain consciousness. So an un-recalled dream is not a dream in fact. But again, all semantics, until we achieve brain-in-a-jar technology, and possibly even then.
