Coltan Scrivner

We don't really understand them that well.

There's, of course, the question of, okay...

Everybody has had a dream before.

Of course they know about it.

They know what it is.

They know that dreams are weird, that they don't make a lot of sense.

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.