Dreams happen in a very different order than we remember them

[beavis]

Its taken me a long time to figure this out. Dreams are mostly independent of time. They're still mostly in neurons in your brain and neurons obey the Standard Model of physics which includes time, but the dreams are calculated without considering what events in the dream happen before or after eachother. The time part is connected together gradually during the dream and most strongly in whatever small parts you remember when you wake up.

I've been sometimes writing a summary of the dreams I remember when I wake up, because it causes me to remember more dreams later. If you don't pay attention to something, it doesn't get stored in your memory. This time I noticed that there was no consistent order I could write the events. X was before Y was before Z was before X. I think this is the normal way it happens and we put it together into linear time later.


In a dream, what use do we have for an event being before or after another event? You could dream about the start and end of something, since you remember the sequence well from times you were awake, and then remember you left some steps out and dream about those, and some time during that it gets connected as a linear sequence of events. But its not always that simple. Things can get simultaneously connected into multiple sequences of events, so you could have 2 dimensional (or more) time without knowing it. Or don't call it time. It flows together naturally with the way brains think about patterns in general. In a dream, there is no difference between time and general patterns, especially about analogies and other ways things relate to eachother.

All these combinations of how events can flow together into time-like patterns after they're dreamed in a timeless way, are why dreams are so confusing.

This is the missing piece of the puzzle that has prevented artificial intelligences from dreaming. Now we can build them to dream as easily as we build them to calculate the movements of robots.

The following theory is not needed to build an artificial intelligence that dreams or to understand most parts of Human dreams.... The universe is 1 thing. I'm not a dualist. Every part of it is connected to at least a few other parts. There is no such thing as "You can't get there from here". The more metaphysical parts of the universe are more similar to our dream way of thinking than how we think while awake, but working in ways similar to dreams does not mean they are dreams. They're as real as anything else. This is why people talk about getting visions or other interactions with metaphysical things while dreaming. Its simply the best way we have to communicate with whoever lives in that part of the universe. This is probably where that religious idea that the universe was dreamed into existence came from, but being similar to a dream does not make something a dream, unless you want to change the definition of "dream" to include it. Either way, that is how we most naturally interact with metaphysical things and why we have difficulty remembering it or representing it in our minds while awake. It doesn't fit into that kind of thinking.

[CFTraveler]

I think dreams happen (or are modulated) at 90 degrees on our conscious brainwaves, which is why they happen so fast concurrently to our thoughts.
Just my pet theory.