David Eagleman

primates like the gray mouse lemur it's called it happens to be very let's call it pre-programmed where it hits adolescence fast and learns how to walk fast and weans from its mother fast and all this stuff reproduces fast and so we looked at how how much dreaming there is and it turns out humans have lots of dreaming to prevent take over the visual cortex whereas other you know less flexible animals have less dreaming because they just don't need it as much

That's exactly right.

Yeah, it's just random activity.

What happens is the synapses, the connections that are hot during the day are the ones when you blast random activity in there, those tend to be the stories that get activated.

So, you know, if I'm thinking about my boss who said this to me, or I'm thinking about this big thing that I have to do tomorrow, then it's likely that that's going to come up in my dreams.

But we all know dreams are just

They're so weird in their plot lines.

And because the brain is a natural storyteller, we end up imposing narrative.

And by the way, when you wake up and you tell somebody else your dream, you're doing a whole nother layer of imposing narrative on it.

Because even just saying it out loud, you have to sort of make things make sense.

But truthfully, it's just random activity.

And it's kind of like a Rorschach blot.

If you just look at some random blob of ink,

Can you see things that you think are relevant to your life?

And you say, oh yeah, that looks like, you know, this is sort of a blob that's telling me that I should go change careers and whatever.

We can do that with our dreams as well.

It's just random activity.

And you can say, yeah, that really thought of something here, whatever.

But yes, it's all random activity.

And what we do is we impose meaning on it.