Coltan Scrivner

I wouldn't know what it was, right?

Sleeping in general is a little weird.

You kind of just die at night.

It's so weird.

You die at night, you go to another world, and then you come back and you wake up.

You're so vulnerable.

For so long.

30-year day.

And so his premise is that that would have provided a selection pressure to start to shape the cognitive machinery necessary for dreaming.

And then once that takes off, you can use dreaming to simulate all sorts of things.

But that was kind of the initial push.

I thought dreaming was a fascinating example of maybe very early morbid curiosity, like our unconscious morbid curiosity.

Now we're thinking about things that could happen to us and we're simulating them in our dreams.

Presumably that happened before we started talking about them, before we had language.

Because dreaming seems to be very evolutionarily old.

We have evidence that cats and rats dream and we're separated by, I cite it in the book, I forget what it is, you know, 50 million or 100 million years or more from them.

Octopuses, who we are hundreds of millions of years separated from.

In fact, they have entirely different nervous systems, but so far back.

So it's not conserved from octopuses, but it developed twice.

Octopuses dream.