Coltan Scrivner

You can snip that connection in other animals.

You can see they get up and they sleepwalk, right?

Or they act out their dreams.

And some people have disorders that cause them to do that.

And so not only is the machinery there for you to hallucinate this entire experience that, yes, it's a little weird.

Dreams are really weird, right?

But they're still cohesive.

They're still a story.

And not only are you doing that cognitively, but you had to also develop a switch to turn your body off so that you don't get up and do the thing.

That, to me...

says, okay, this has to have some kind of selection pressure because that is not an accidental.

That's a lot of engineering.

The aliens were, they were really working on it.

The first question is, why would we have that machinery?

And so you need something really compelling to build that or to start to build that.

And this guy, I'm going to butcher his name.

His last name is Ravonsuo, I think, Anton Ravonsuo.

He's a Finnish neuroscientist and philosopher.

He's developed this theory of the threat simulation theory of dreaming.

So he thinks that the first dreams were probably nightmares because dreaming about a danger and rehearsing that emotionally, sending the signals to your body that would be relevant in that situation to move your body, rehearsing it cognitively, rehearsing something dangerous would be really valuable.