Even sleep is no barrier to the brain’s story-making processes. Dreams feel real because they’re made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake.

One study of dreams concluded that if we live to eighty years old, six years of our life will have been spent dreaming—not sleeping, which is a far higher percentage. Six years dreaming! Apparently, dreams are tied to our nature and its effort to process, metabolize, correct, and heal the fissures that lie within each of us.

the dreaming brain was not simply recapitulating or re-creating exactly what happened to them in the maze. Rather, the dream algorithm was cherry-picking salient fragments of the prior learning experience, and then attempting to place those new experiences within the back catalog of preexisting knowledge. Like an insightful interviewer, dreaming

During sleep or quiet downtime, memories that have been buffered in the hippocampus get replayed over and over - creating the sort of endless repetition that is needed to store information in the weights of a target neural network. In the biological case, that target is the neocortex, which is gradually 'trained' by replay activity to incorporate