We have two brains.
No, not left side and right side, but they do suggest that two brains co-existing is possible.
The Bulk Brain & the Filter Brain. They are interspersed, covering the same fullness of the brain, but the Bulk makes up a whole lot more.
Dwarfing the two interspersed brains is the database. A collection of thoughts, memories, memories of thoughts, analytical theories and algorithmic processes. Both brains access that same data.
I’ve paid a lot of attention to dreams, and I have learned to appreciate that dreams can never be 100% realistic and believable.
When you dream of people, typically they will have the persona of the person you are actually dreaming about, but the person you visualise is someone else you know. This causes a disconnect, and helps you know dreams aren’t real. But the story of the dream rings true, and you leave the dream with a universal truth or moral.
Also, dreams are not video – they are a series of still pictures, and your brain fills in the gaps. Now that is actually what video is (so many frames per second), except way slower. I reckon maybe a frame every two seconds. This is evidence of a different type of brain. Tweaked to run slower.
Maybe dreams run slowly because of less energy being available because your are in sleep mode?
The Filter Brain that exists to create dreams and maybe help with the sub-conscious, might be a quantum computer.
Quite possibly, when the Filter Brain makes dreams, it takes information from the database, but instead of a bunch of things (places, objects, people, stories) that are connected to each other, it takes the next thing along in that part of the database. So instead of Mum and Dad getting married, you get Uncle Jack, Mum’s best friend Amy, and it is a divorce.
Or it could be a quantum computer that has somehow worked out how the components of a story can be recognised as working cohesively, logically together.
Regardless, dreams are purposefully unable to be totally real. Because if dreams felt 100% real, we would go mad. So by design dreams give us a life lesson or at least exploring a scenario, without the components being accurate enough to sense that it was real.
Here’s where it could get interesting… Our subconscious, which is presumably way more powerful and important than our dreams, is a mix of two brains – the Bulk Brain and the Filter Brain. To some degree, our subconscious is a rational brain with a bit of random chaos thrown in.
It could be that the three brains all use the same type of computing, but apply different logic for each. Regular logic, off-by-just-one logic, and for the sub-conscious, fuzzy logic.