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It boggles my mind that we so rarely see sleep as the utterly bizarre thing that it is. This comic describes it perfectly for me:

http://www.xkcd.com/c203.html

I often wonder what is going on in my brain when I go to sleep, how much control I'm giving up. While the I-Function is active during REM sleep, most of us still can't control what we think or see (and no one can control their movements, since we can't move at all). How can only part of the I-Function be active? How can the I-Function be turned off? It seems almost impossible to conceive of, since we generally have such a cohesive experience of reality. How can we be fractured and broken down in this way, in terms of patterns of action potentials in the neocortex? But that's how it is, amazingly enough. How in the world did this type of system emerge? How did the storyteller come into play, in a system that emerged with no guidance?

I've heard it suggested that dreams are the brain's way of making sense of random signals induced during sleep. The storyteller in us acts even during certain times of the sleep cycle to make sense of what input we receive (both from the sensory system and input generated within ourselves) to make a coherent case. Where does that drive come from? Why do we put so much of ourselves into describing and rationalizing the world?