Once in my life, just once, and only for a moment, I watched myself dream. That happened in the 1978-1979 school year.
That morning I woke up having a visual dream. There was a scene in my mind which felt pretty realistic. It was not real but it had sufficient details to be the equivalent of a memory: If it had a house it also had a front lawn and a street and an intersection, a sky up above, colors and spatial relationships. It also had a story line or, if not that, at least a stream of consciousness sequence as the dream developed from image to image.
That morning I woke up having a verbal dream. There was a sentence in my mind which felt pretty realistic. It had no accuracy but it had sufficient details to be the equivalent of a memory: If it mentioned a dog it also told where the dog ran and what induced him to stop or to turn. It also had a story line or, if not that, at least a stream of consciousness sequence as the dream developed from sentence to sentence.
The visual dream had no words. The verbal dream had no images. And they were completely unrelated to each other. It was as if my brain were divided into 2 hemispheres one handling words and the other dealing with pictures, something which is, of course, factually true.
So these separate dreams were floating on frame by frame and paragraph by paragraph utterly in parallel until I began to become conscious. Until the connections from hemisphere to hemisphere woke up, step by step, channel by channel. Then the whole brain, the combined brain, demanded consistency, demanded unity, demanded a single truth and at once each story began to change to be more like the other dream. The house (if there was a house) needed to be the home of the dog (if there was a dog) and soon, almost instantly, the dog (if there was a dog) found himself running around the front yard of the house (if there was a house).
This unity, this broad consistency, this logic came at a price. The new dream made no rational sense. The predecessor dreams each were rational in a piecewise fashion; what was seen or heard at one moment changed into the next moment in a plausible way. But how would you explain something in one dream which would not be in the other? Suppose the dog was chasing a bear? Now the bear has to be in the house or in the yard or in the street. You would have to make up some explanation for the bear running toward the intersection -- that is, if there was a bear and a dog and if there was a house and a street.
And so since 1979 I have insisted there is nothing whatever puzzling about puzzling dreams.
And so since 1979 I have disregarded pretty much everything I have read about dreaming because it is obvious that people writing this nonsense know virtually nothing at all about dreams, how they work, or how they fit into the neural structure of the brain, or brains, which support them.
In actual reality only I know.
And no one listens to me.