Coltan Scrivner

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.

Like, oh, I had a dream about this and this happened.

Right.

Probably going to butcher the pronunciation, but it's like oniromancy, understanding what dreams mean, how they can tell the future.

Every culture has been interested in that because dreaming is kind of a weird thing.

Like you go to sleep, you die for like eight hours.

You don't exist in the real world, but you are in another world.

You know, it's kind of a weird thing that happens.

Yeah.

And what's interesting about it is like cats, you talked about cat, like cat's dream, rat's dream, dog's dream.

We're at least, let's say conservatively, 70 maybe million years diverged from small mammals like that.

Meaning that that machinery has been around for a long time in mammals.

And then the example with octopus, octopus have an entirely different nervous system than us.

So not only is it interesting that they dream, it's interesting because they're

they evolved that ability separately from the mammalian line because it's an entirely different type of nervous system.