Tag: dreams

Dreams as Internal Psychotherapy of Mind

Published on March 20, 2021

In my previous post, I talked about how mental imagery (illustrated by but certainly not limited to vision) ultimately derives from memories, modified by the pink noise that all of us have in our brains. This is why malleability of memories is so useful (unlike the pixel-perfect digital storage): it allows creativity. The same applies to dreams, but with a twist. Again, the contents of our dreams derive from memories (we wouldn’t dream an apple if we never saw one in our lives), but the modification of the images (and other sensory modalities) is more extreme. What’s going on? Ernest…

Remembered Present and Mental Imagery

Published on March 11, 2021

Last time, we talked about writers on the aphantasia spectrum–a reduced detail of mental imagery (whether visual or audio or any other sensory modality, although I will use the visual one for examples). Interestingly, with few exceptions, the same level of detail (from almost-photographic to vague to near-nonexistent) applies not just to voluntary or involuntary imagining but also to memories and dreams. What is going on here? Could there be some commonality between these forms of mental imagery? Indeed, there is–at least, this is what current neuroscience tells us. In fact, most of our mental imagery is ultimately based on…