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The ideas of daydreams and dreams are very interesting to me. In some ways I have a hard time applying the boxes within boxes model of the nervous system to dreams. I often find myself trying to deconstruct my dreams or dreams that other people describe to me by relating them to real life events. If I can remember a strange, vivid dream I like to try to figure out what caused it. More specifically, I compare the events in my dreams to the events that have occurred in my real life. It's my way of making sense of dreams that seem to combine oddly paired situations and people. Most of the time I can come up with something. Even when a dream doesn't resemble an event that happened in my life recently I can sometimes figure out an emotion I've been feeling in which my dream is likely rooted. Therefore, the idea of boxes within boxes or outputs without inputs is difficult to apply. It seems like I can almost always find something that triggered a dream. On the other hand, there are sometimes details that are hard to remember. Maybe these details are a creation of the brain. But then again, the brain is basing these details on some sort of knowledge or perception that has been stored within it. So maybe boxes within boxes can be thought of as storage spaces where things like the details of our dreams are kept.

On a separate note, there has been some discussion about the idea of reality being a creation of the brain. For example, if there would be no sky if my brain didn't perceive or create a sky but there is a sky because my brain does pereive it. But if I have a dream about a forest is there a forest? My brain is creating the forest. Is that the same as perceiving a forest? My brain is still creating something. How is that different in a dream? What makes one forest real and not the other?

James Pena