Our dreams are so real and sometimes so frightening because our dreams are made of the same stuff as what we think we see.  We never actually see the world on the other side of our eyeballs; we imagine it. The brain creates incredibly convincing images shaped like clay in the hands of a sculptor, but the images are created out of the photon energy that streams through our pupils and stimulates cells on our retina. From there, elector-chemical signals are sent to the brain and almost instantaneously we have the impression we are seeing the face of a friend, or a vase of flowers, or a butterfly bobbing about in our flower garden.

Those synthetic images created by our brains (like changing images on a TV screen) are the same kinds of images we see in our dreams: brain-created but originating not from external sources (the real world) but from the memories, aspirations, and fears that dwell in our brains. It is not unlikely that some of the those dream images rise up out of 3 billion years of evolutionary history embedded in our genes.

As Shakespeare once wrote: “We look not with the eyes but with the mind.” So, too, it is with our minds that we dream. That is why dreaming is so real.

For more on this theme, see: “Shakespeare and the Mind’s Eye,” an article I wrote for the Chestnut Hill Local

https://www.chestnuthilllocal.com/2011/12/22/shakespeare-and-the-mind%E2%80%99s-eye/