Hello All,

Here is a question I found while perusing various dream discussion websites:

Hello, I would appreciate if anyone can send me information about any research, if any, on the images that we see on our dreams. Are these images "reflected" (as in a film) somewhere? (may be in the interior of our eyelids? or in some area of our brain?) How those images are created, sometimes so perfectly, for us to see them? How are we able to "see" those images?

And, here is my reply:

Hi Angelhound,

I have a theory that involves memory and functional aspects of the dreaming brain. When the brain dreams, there is evidence suggesting that it does not perceive dreaming as physical experience. In the dreaming brain, this evidence is suggested by depressed prefrontal brain activation and the partial cessation of brainstem function as suggested by atonia. Such evidence suggests to me that dreaming is the perception of mental experience. As a mental experience, dreaming is not as much about physical imagery as it is about mental influences—in my opinion.

For example, fear is a mental influence our experiences evoke; however, fear alone is not a physical image. When we experience fear while dreaming, we are experiencing something that is not physical or a physical image. In my view, our brain only associates physical imagery with our dreams as we awake from dreaming. When we awake with memories of having dreams those memories are caused by our arousing brain’s attempt to interpret something it experienced during sleep that was not physical.

The process of applying physical interpretations or values to a purely mental experience is what makes our dreams memorable. We remember our wakeful experiences better than our dream experiences because our wakeful experience involve true physicality while our dream experiences do not. Whatever we remember about our dreams, it is because of our brain’s use of physical references to interpret something it believes it experienced mentally—in my opinion.