I recently wrote about my first Lucid Dream. Two things distinguished it from a regular dream:
1. I knew I was dreaming
2. It was extraordinarily vivid, as if I was wide awake.
I've been reading about the visual cortex recently and have a theory that might explain (2).
After some processing, input from the eyes arrives at the visual cortex area called V1. V1 performs high-resolution pattern recognition, finding lines and movement in your visual field. Outputs from V1 feed into the V2, V3, V4 and V5 areas which perform higher-level pattern recognition.
Funnily enough, visual processing is not a linear pipeline. Most areas both send and receive information from their neighbors. For example, although V1 sends a lot of outputs to V2, it also receives a lot of inputs from V2.
If my theory about dreams is correct, a dream is simply the result of portions of our brain waking up while the rest sleeps - the workings of a partial mind. When we sleep, the brain actively suppresses the V1 area. If V1 is suppressed and other parts of the visual cortex wake up, we cannot dream in high resolution because the area that corresponds to that level of resolution is asleep. So we would be conscious of higher-level shapes and motion, but not see the details.
However, if for some reason the active suppression of V1 did not occur, we would be able to dream in high resolution; V2 could feed it data which in the absence of the usual flood of input from the retina could be perceived as high-resolution imagery.
So my theory is that in order to have a Lucid dream, V1 suppression is somehow inhibited.
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