Table of Contents

What's real?

Reality is experienced in real-time—imagine living at "60 fps". Every movement and thought flows continuously, with our consciousness reacting instantly to the world around us while drawing on past experiences to shape future plans. This process even tackles complex challenges like feature binding (in our context, it's the brain’s method for uniting various sensory inputs in real-time).

Dreams, however, are not bound by real-time. Instead, they are constructed within a context, simulating scenarios (like escaping from a bear) that don’t occur in the moment. During sleep, the cholinergic system (here, I refer to the neural activations that spark random activity, which the brain later organizes into coherent dream narratives) becomes active. Amidst this neural chaos, the brain pieces together a handful of seemingly random "scripts" to create the dream experience.

This contrast highlights the distinct nature of our waking reality and the imaginative, context-driven world of dreams.