Coltan Scrivner

The plots have some holes in them and the visuals are kind of weird.

Sometimes you can fly or do other crazy things.

But they are still audiovisual simulations that have a plot of some kind, even if it's weird.

And if you didn't have the nerves to your muscles kind of shut off when you're sleeping, you would actually act them out.

And there's studies showing in other animals that if you sever certain neuronal connections, animals act out their dreams, right?

And typically they're acting out defensive maneuvers, right?

So not only is it this audiovisual hallucination, it's also stimulating the correct motor neurons to make you move.

And then we evolved a way to stop that.

So that's just a lot of complex machinery for something that doesn't have a cause or doesn't have a reason to exist, right?

If you're a biologist and you see something like that, like, wow, that took a lot of very specific...

evolutionary directing for this machinery to come about.

So it probably serves some kind of purpose.

That's right.

Probably did something that enhanced fitness at some point, even if it doesn't still.

And so there's an interesting theory out there about why dreams ever came about in the first place.

And the theory goes that, well,

It would have been pretty useful to essentially simulate encounters with different kinds of threats while you're asleep because you can prepare for them, maybe literally, but also emotionally, again, preparing how you handle stress, essentially, but also maybe the dangers that are local to you and relevant to you.

And so that could be a good explanation for why that machinery evolved in the first place.

Now, once it's there, we might dream about all kinds of things.

But it's like the people who would have initially been able to dream about these things would have probably also been seen as some kind of like clairvoyant wizard in their society.