In my experience, it seems that dreams coincide with my daily life to some extent. This makes perfect sense since you spend your day worrying or mulling over certain thoughts, leaving your subconscious to take off from there and go wherever it wants when we sleep.
Yet we all have control over our thoughts, and I realize some more than others (don't forget things like OCD, depression, bipolar disorder, etc.). So in theory we are simply providing our brains with the outline for our dreams. Our subconscious takes over from there and uses its own set of rules to create our dreams.
This is the most fascinating characteristic of dreams - the fact that an uncontrollable part of our brain can have such control over our "thoughts" (thoughts being in quotes because we are not fully conscious). So I wonder if we actually have any control over this aspect of our brains. If we do not, that is crazy. If we do, we might be able to unlock hidden potential - further utilizing our massive cortex.
This post was inspired by an incredibly detailed dream I had last night - but with seemingly no connection to that day's experience. Keeping it brief, I dreamt I was with my family in a small village in the mountains somewhere. In these mountains a strange thing was happening - white bears (not polar bears though) we digging massive holes in the snow on the side of mountains, as if they were looking for something.
Finally I was able to watch the event first hand and saw these white bears dragging massive grizzly bears out of these holes and fighting them. Sometimes the grizzlies would win, other times they would die, but if they survived the grizzlies went on manhunts - killing people all over this mountain.
This clearly frightened the people of the village and we gathered in a small clearing outside of town for safety. The clearing was outdoors but somehow had doors and furniture - a combination of being in and outside. After a while a group of us went to go see if anything was happening in the old village. Shortly after leaving the safety of the clearing we found ourselves being stalked by a pack of wolves but managed to escape.
We returned, shaken. But soon we set out on another expedition we ran into trouble again. One of the members of the group shot another - causing a wild frenzy and attracting the attention of a wild pack of dogs which we somehow concluded was the cause of all the chaos we were experiencing.
Another series of detailed and emotionally provoking events took place but I would fill up pages trying to complete it all. The most staggering thing about this dream was how detailed it was. I usually have simplistic and explainable dreams, but this one is filled with so many strange events. I woke up feeling as though I had actually lived it.
Perhaps this is the key to virtual reality - harnessing the power of this subconscious part of the brain and tricking it into helping us experience fulfilling events. Taken one step further - perhaps this will one day allow humans to exist as vegetables, not experiencing anything in reality but living a completely satisfying life within a dream world.
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