[Grieverheart]

I once trained myself to recognise if I was dreaming by looking at something in my dream, looking away and looking back again. If the thing I was looking at had changed in any way, I was dreaming. This allowed me to partly shape my dreams, so I can’t totally buy the conjecture that senses are what’s taking the dream machine. Another thing supporting this is the fact that I could let my body fall asleep while keeping my consciousness awake. Even though the senses are technically shut off (sleep paralysis), I was not dreaming. I think the fact that dreaming is similar to generative models has more to do with how we learn shapes, and that is by learning sub shapes and categories of shapes. My theory is that that’s also how long term memory works. Instead of storing the full senses senses at that moment, parts of those senses are replaced by concepts/sub shapes.