It's all in your head

So I've been meaning to type this for ages but due to my obvious laziness, I have never had the patience to sit down and write this up. Last night however, I had a really vivid dream that was induced by massive sleep deprivation, and here I am now finally with the patience to write it up. The topic of choice? Dreams.

I'm not here to go though different theories on why we dream, rather just to talk about the dreaming process itself. Why we  dream is a completely separate discussion on it's own, and we as humans still don't know why we really do dream. Personally, I just think that we dream because our brain needs something to do while the rest of our body is recovering so that it is always processing something for 24 hours a day.

The way your brain creates a dream from scratch, or constructs a dream using similar events but still creating a new 'story' is one thing that will always amaze me. Sometimes you may have a boring dream that hardly makes sense and other times you may have a dream that flows like a well told story. It's those dreams that make you really wonder how your brain can be so creative yet if you were to try that while awake, you can not think of anything like it.

Another thing about dreams that also amazes me is how not only  your visual senses are aroused, but so are all your other senses. You can smell, hear, and  feel things just like you would in real life. You can hear people's voices exactly how you remember them, they act and behave exactly as they do, and this is for words you have never heard them say and actions you have never seen them do. Inside your head, you are able to visualise everything exactly like it would happen in real life.

On the outside, it seems quite amazing how all this can go on inside your head while you sleep, but if you look at it on a more detailed level, it is quite understandable how it happens. After all, your brain does process every sensory stimuli that it receives, so it would only make sense that if it could recreate this stimuli, it would feel exactly like real life. So when you think about it, everything that you see, hear, smell, and feel in real life are all just electrical impulses inside your head, and when you dream, it is the exact thing occurring, just a little less accurate in most cases.

When it is put into that perspective, you can then realise how some dreams can leave you wanting more the next day because you have experienced some of the best feelings but as realistic as they felt, they only lasted for a brief period and aren't embedded in your long term memory. It's just not fair that our body has the potential to do this, but we have no control over it. Sometimes the unanswered questions in life really do suck.

* I do realise that there is no flow to all this. I am pretty tired now since I left this till late, and I just want to get the damn thing out of the way.