Coltan Scrivner

And when you wake up, certainly before we kind of knew what dreams were, you're going to wake up and you're going to tell everyone you know, because you don't know why you had that.

Did I go to a new world?

You know, we don't really know what dreaming is.

Did I travel to see my ancestors?

And there are cultures that believe that, reasonably so.

You know, if I was born a thousand years ago, I'd be terrified of dreams.

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.