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.