Dreams

I find dreams fascinating for a number of reasons.  One of the things I find most interesting is the conversations we have with people in our dreams.  There are various theories as to how the brain deals with information, in particular how it deals with information about the individuals we meet and interact with.  One such theory is that we create Internal Working Models of the people we interact with, we even have an internal working model of ourselves - or at least of the person we see when we look in the mirror, and the attitude and behaviours we think we express.  As far as the model of ourself goes that one is pretty easy to prove inaccurate.  Our view of ourself is warped, we are naturally biased in this respect.  You only have to think about your "internal voice" the one inside your head right now that you are reading this post in - that is if you aren't imagining my voice which some of you will have heard.

The models of others however can be more accurate than we care to admit, maybe even more than the subject cares to admit but again this will depend on how well you know them.  The more information about an individual and the more behaviour you observe the more detailed your model of them will become, to the point where you can imagine how a particular conversation would go.  This is what I find fascinating about dreams, when we dream about others, if these models are involved which I assume they are, then you could have conversations with them in your dreams that would probably play out as they would in reality.  Does this ever affect our behaviour towards them?  I know it's pretty obvious that the more embarrassing you would find telling the person about the dream in detail, the more likely it would affect your interaction with them.  Take the example of having a sex dream about someone you work with, if you don't know them well then that dream would for most people cause some degree of embarrassment.

The question of accuracy is perhaps most interesting however in regards to people we have limited interactions with.  For example if you dream about someone you've never actually met, and never heard speak, how accurate could the voice you hear in the dream be?  Would it even be a voice or would the meaning be intimated by your unconscious?  Staying with the theme of sex, how accurate could the 'events' of your dream be to life? - again if you have never experienced this with the person before.  I think most people will have realistic dreams that capture the moment in vivid detail, but how accurate can we be in dreaming of things that have not [yet] happened?

We will invariably incorporate our experiences into our dreams, and while we may not have any experience that directly relates to the individual in question, e.g. never having heard them speak, we do have experience of what other people look like and what they sound like.  While we may pose that logically there would never be any real correlation between what someone looks like and what they sound like, we can at least agree that each of the binary genders male and female have an atypical vocal range and there are stereotypes that you would expect - e.g. male voices are deeper.  The amazing thing about dreams is that the processing our brains undertake when we dream isn't carried out by the conscious mind but rather the sub-conscious meaning the range of conclusions and scenarios it can permute are a lot wider than our conscious mind, while we, here and now, awake, can not quickly conclude any correlation in our vast experience, the sub-conscious mind potentially can.  Our sub-conscious while we sleep and dream can take our entire collection of experiences and present a scenario based upon them.  So with dreams about things that haven't happened, how accurate can they really be?