This all seems to match my experience. I’ve looked for differences between my Dutch language mind and English language mind and nothing stood out. (They’re more similar languages and cultures, of course.) Dreams seem very random, more like a monkey hitting my brain’s narrative soundboard than like a story with an author.
Leaving the others aside, I think the way you both frame dreams one really confuses me. Dreams are at best half-random—in mine there are events and preoccupations from the day, as well as recurring themes and anxieties. Some examples of mine: hiking up hill and feeling my thighs clamp up, viruses taking over my computer with popups and requiring an OS wipe, teeth falling out.
If the scenery you encounter is not you and is being constructed in a deliberate way by some brain module, surely something in your brain is constructing it, right? I frame this thing as “another agent.” Perhaps you never get to experience being that agent.
This whole part is true, but I don’t see what relevance it has?
If the scenery you encounter is not you
Well, of course it’s not me. It’s scenery.
and is being constructed in a deliberate way by some brain module
Uh, who says it is?! Is this an assumption you’re operating with?? This seems extremely questionable to me, to say the least!
In any case, I have never experienced anything like a reason to believe that any “brain module” is deliberately constructing my dreams, much less any reason to view whatever brain activity is responsible for generation dreams as an agent. The idea of being the agent that is deliberately constructing my dreams is something I find actually incomprehensible. I worry that I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, because of how bizarre it sounds, yet your comment seems to be written clearly enough—so I am perplexed about what could be going on here.
I’m trying to pin down your confusion. I only see three ways to interpret your statement: (a) you don’t believe dreams originate from neural activity, (b) you don’t believe this neural activity is patterned in some intentional way, or (c) you don’t believe whatever pattern of neural activity this is fits into the category “agent”? (a) is hard to believe and (c) is (mostly?) semantics, so I’m guessing it’s (b).
If the confusion is (b), the only way I can think of testing that is checking how useful/interesting/coherent the contents of dreams is, and this suggests that there is some intentional content in them.
Regarding the idea of being the agent that is deliberately constructing my dreams, in my rather unsatisfactory adventures with lucid dreaming I’ve had a handful of brief lucid moments where I had the clear conscious experience of conjuring pieces of the dream environment into existence by expecting particular things to be there. Unfortunately in each instance the dream dissipated quickly and I woke up, but the conviction remains: whatever is constructing my dreams is something I can access deliberately. Perhaps check out accounts of lucid dreaming on r/LucidDreaming for more successful examples.
Most dream descriptions that I’ve come across have sounded to me like the output of Magic Realism Bot, which is arguably somewhat useful/interesting/coherent but definitely has no intentional content.
Ok, this is basically what I believe too, modulo the occasional manifestation of desires/anxieties/memories. Here’s my current version of the multiple agents model:
(1) There are processes in the brain like the “dream-generator” and “various pieces of System 2″ that I experience as definitely not me. They are not conscious or all that agenty but have enough of a semblance of intent that you might forgive someone for anthropomorphizing them.
(2) There are methods of introspection such as focusing, meditation, and lucid dreaming which allow you deliberate access to these processes. The internal experience of accessing these processes is becoming or fusing with them, e.g. Focusing feels like speaking for a suppressed voice. What’s actually going on might be “accessing data and algorithms that was hidden from you.”
(3) You experience various states of mind hooked onto each process. The combination of you hooked onto process A is significantly different in terms of experiences, values, and/or personality from just you or you hooked onto process B. The claim is that it is often useful to think about these different states as “different agents living in the same brain.”
It’s (b), naturally. (Although (c) is also true, and would be true even sans (b); I don’t know why you say it’s (even mostly) semantics.)
checking how useful/interesting/coherent the contents of dreams is, and this suggests that there is some intentional content in them.
I don’t really know what you’re talking about when you say this… this seems to me to be an exceedingly strange idea. It’s… obviously false? (Again I am confronted with that strange, vertigo-like feeling that comes of seeing some apparently clearly stated and yet utterly bizarre claim, made by someone who does not behave as if they are saying anything particularly odd or unusual. I certainly want to hear more about what on earth could possibly make someone believe and say such things!)
As far as lucid dreaming goes… it’s certainly interesting (and I have done a little bit of reading about it, though not a lot)… but if your claim is that it tells us anything very significant or reliable about the normal structure of ordinary (i.e., non-lucid) dreams, then I am very skeptical and request some serious citations. It seems to me to fall into the category of “mental self-modification”; and of course it’s interesting, in an academic sense, that people are able to self-modify in this way… but… if I tie a string into some complicated knot, I am hardly licensed to conclude from this that “having knots” is a general property of strings.
(I guess I should ask, at this point, whether we’re still talking only about our respective experiences, or whether we’re attempting to discuss how dreams work for people in general. If the latter, well—I have many questions, let’s put it that way.)
Meta-note: I tend to err on the side of overstating my confidence so as to better elicit debate. I am actually unsure of (b) at present and aware that “dreams having intentions” is at least a little weird. Perhaps I didn’t communicate that clearly.
I’ll have more to say tomorrow but for now: my models of multiple agents and “dreams having intentions” are predicated on at least a weak version of Jungian (and ergo Freudian) psychoanalysis, and it seems to me that Focusing, IDC are also predicated on these ideas (as fake but useful frames let’s say).
Whether or not dreams actually have intentional structure is up to debate in my mind, but I can say my own dreams are at very least surprisingly detailed, fruitful, and subject-relevant material to sift through for metaphorical insight. This surprise, which only occurred after I started writing down my dreams and noticed how exorbitantly detailed they are, is sufficient that I am prone to the hypothesis that there’s more than just “stream of rich relevant babble” going on.
I tend to err on the side of overstating my confidence so as to better elicit debate.
Fair enough, this is certainly understandable.
… fake but useful frames …
I have looked askance at this concept (“fake frameworks”, etc.) ever since I first saw it discussed around here, and continue to be skeptical. It seems to me to be a way to verbally disclaim belief in some view (in order to avoid having to defend its truth—usually due to knowing perfectly well that no credible defense is possible), while still acting as if said view is true. I take a dim view of that, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
Now, I don’t know how you’re using the term/concept, so I have no idea if any of that applies to your views here. In particular, I don’t know what you mean when you speak of a “weak version” of Jungian psychoanalysis, nor what it means for something to be “predicated on” said idea as a “fake but useful frame”. All of these are things I’d love to see you expand / clarify, so I look forward to reading your further comments on this.
… my own dreams are at very least surprisingly detailed, fruitful, and subject-relevant material to sift through for metaphorical insight.
Interesting. This seems to be shaping up more and more to be a matter of interpersonal variation, yes? (For me, no such thing is remotely true, nor ever has been.)
… writing down my dreams and noticed how exorbitantly detailed they are …
I… have serious doubts about the idea that writing down your dreams actually works. (To be more precise: I view it as a highly non-trivial proposition, that if you have a dream, wake up, and write down [or recount verbally to someone, etc.] the content of your dream, that what you have written down is in fact a description of what you dreamed. Indeed, it’s not even clear to me that there is a fact of the matter about “what you dreamed”; if there is not, then this would, of course, make the previous proposition not just questionable but necessarily false.)
I have myself felt that the concept “fake framework” is often a way (at least when it is misused) to avoid the burden of proof, and I confess that was part of what I was doing above. Thanks for keeping me honest.
Interesting. This seems to be shaping up more and more to be a matter of interpersonal variation, yes? (For me, no such thing is remotely true, nor ever has been.)
Regarding the detail of dreams, it’s certainly possible that it’s a matter of interpersonal variation, but I also believed ~six months ago that I dreamed very infrequently and in not that much detail. After writing down my dreams for a few days, my recall of dreams is substantially improved, to the point that I can recall an average of two dreams a morning with very little effort and remember much more detail about them.
Let me suggest the following experiment: each morning for three days (a week would be better but three days should do) immediately after you wake up, try to recall and write down as much about your dreams as you can for five minutes. If after three days your experience remains unchanged I’ll update towards the “idiosyncratic alkjash” model.
I… have serious doubts about the idea that writing down your dreams actually works.
It sounds like you’re suggesting dream recall is “my brain filling in fake details to a story when prompted,” which seems the much more unlikely explanation than “I have dreams and then remember them piece by piece.” For one, I usually, but don’t always manage to remember my dreams. For another, if I could reliably make up details as interesting as the stuff that happens in my dreams I would write much better fiction.
It sounds like you’re suggesting dream recall is “my brain filling in fake details to a story when prompted,” which seems the much more unlikely explanation than “I have dreams and then remember them piece by piece.”
What I’m suggesting is, on the one hand, not actually anything quite so specific as that, and on the other hand something potentially far stranger and less straightforward.
Before I say more about this, I want to detour very briefly to address the rest of what you say in that paragraph:
For one, I usually, but don’t always manage to remember my dreams.
This is not at all inconsistent with even the suggestion that you guessed I was making. (There’s no reason why the ability to confabulate can’t vary from one day to another, for example.)
For another, if I could reliably make up details as interesting as the stuff that happens in my dreams I would write much better fiction.
Likewise, there’s no reason to expect that you should necessarily have conscious, on-demand access to whatever mechanism lets you confabulate dream-recollections.
Now, as for what I meant by my comment…
Daniel Dennett has an excellent essay (which was published as part of his book Brainstorms) called “Are Dreams Experiences?” If you can find it, I would highly recommend reading it.
Now, to be clear, I am not proffering Dennett’s essay as support for my claim (indeed, I have yet to make any clear positive claim). The reason I bring it up is because in this essay, Dennett challenges what he calls the “received view” of what dreams are (i.e., the notion that they are experiences that one has while asleep, which may then be recalled upon waking, much like any ordinary experience one has may later be recalled). He offers several alternative models for what dreams could be, and explores the implications of those models, what evidence exists for them, etc.
The key thing that I got from Dennett’s essay—and from other reading I’ve done about dreams, and from my own experiences—is that we should be much less confident than we are in our standard view of what dreams are.
Let me suggest the following experiment …
It so happens that I have, at one point, done basically this exact thing (it was a while ago, but as I recall, it was an assignment for one of my psychology courses in college); and a bit less formally but more recently, I’ve many times deliberately tried to notice, upon waking, what my recall of dreams was like (for example, taking melatonin for insomnia made me notice this sort of thing more, for reasons which may be obvious to many people who’ve also taken melatonin). And what I got from my self-observation was that the notion of “recalling what I experienced in my dream(s)” is (at least for me) not only mostly impossible, but mostly incoherent as well.
What attempting to write down or recount a dream feels like, to me, is confabulation. I am telling a story, but I know—as I am telling it—that I’m making it up. The details were different. It was all different—stranger—more disjointed—less coherent—but I can’t remember any of that; it’s fleeing my mind from the very first moment I try to recall it, the moment I wake; all I can do is try to fill in the details with guesses, cliches, etc. But it’s wrong; it’s much more mundane than the “actual dream” (if there was such a thing). (Indeed—as Dennett also points out in his essay—it often seems like trying to recall the dream makes the memory of it flee faster.)
So when I realized all of that (which wasn’t difficult; the realization came basically as soon as I started trying), I stopped trying to recall my dreams. I didn’t, and don’t, want to fool myself.
It seems to me that waking experience has many features which we take very much for granted, which are fundamental to… well, to being able to apprehend the world in any kind of coherent way… and which we are often tempted to ascribe to dreams, but which dreams often (usually?) simply do not have. These are things like: sequence; causation; object permanence; object identity; linearity; integration of sensory perception; and others in this vein. But we lack the language necessary to speak of experience that lacks these features. It may be impossible even to properly imagine such experiences while we are awake. And yet not only do we blithely describe dreams in more or less the same terms as we speak of waking experiences (with only minor and paltry deviations), we in fact regularly impose on them a narrative structure that even our waking experiences—which do have all of the aforementioned properties—usually lack!
So the fact is that I simply do not trust any account, produced by one who is awake, of what one’s dream was like. I have never seen anything to suggest that I should expect such accounts to be reliable, and much to suggest the very opposite. (Note that the fact that we have to describe our dreams in words makes it all the worse!)
To add to all of that, I have several more prosaic reasons for the view that I hold—other aspects of my experience that I base my comments on. One is that I often don’t recall my dreams at all, period—not even for a second. I awake, and all memory of the dream is gone instantly. I know that I dreamed; but that is all. Another is that I often spend the latter part of my sleep period falling out of and into a sleep state; certainly I am not awake enough, during such times, to be consciously recollecting anything—but neither am I dreaming (or perhaps I am, but then I do not recall even the fact of dreaming—much less the content of any dreams I have in such a state).
So, you see, I really recognize none of my own experience in what you describe; quite the opposite…
What attempting to write down or recount a dream feels like, to me, is confabulation. I am telling a story, but I know—as I am telling it—that I’m making it up. The details were different. It was all different—stranger—more disjointed—less coherent—but I can’t remember any of that; it’s fleeing my mind from the very first moment I try to recall it, the moment I wake; all I can do is try to fill in the details with guesses, cliches, etc. But it’s wrong; it’s much more mundane than the “actual dream” (if there was such a thing). (Indeed—as Dennett also points out in his essay—it often seems like trying to recall the dream makes the memory of it flee faster.)
This is my experience as well. I actually wrote most of the following paragraph before reading your comment, in response to alkjash’s comment above:
My own experience with recounting my dreams afterwards is that often, they include elements which somehow seem to make sense within the dream but afterwards turn out to be incoherent. In order to construct even a half-way coherent narrative—that is, not one that sounds like it could have actually happened, but one which could even be understood—I often need to simplify things and explain it in a way which isn’t quite what happened in the dream, but rather the closest approximation of something coherent that I can construct out of the incomplete skeleton that the dream gave me.
The two pieces of evidence I mentioned are not inconsistent with your model, but they seem to certainly be weak evidence for mine.
I will chalk it up to minds being more different than I expected. If you can offer any testable predictions about the “confabulation hypothesis” I’d be happy to try them, but it seems far-fetched to me.
Again I want to emphasize that I’m not making any specific, strong claim. “Confabulation” is one possibility (broadly speaking), but there are several ways to construe what I’ve described, under some of which “confabulation” is not really the best way to describe what’s going on.
As for testable predictions, well… it’s hard to say. Certainly if what I describe as my experience is nothing at all like yours, then that’s evidence against my “model”[1] of dreams—at least in your case! My model would predict my experiences, and antipredict yours, after all.
I again refer you to Dennett, who, in his aforementioned essay, gives some interesting differences in predictions between types of theories about the nature of dreams. I do warn you, however, that little of what he has to present is stronger evidence for the individual case than individual experience is. In other words, whatever Dennett has to say, I don’t expect it’s likely that you’ll change your mind about what sorts of things your dreams are. (Not impossible, mind you; just not likely.)
As you say, minds are different.
[1] It’s not really a model, of course, but more like an anti-model—a set of intuitions / anecdata / considerations / etc. that rule out certain models.
This all seems to match my experience. I’ve looked for differences between my Dutch language mind and English language mind and nothing stood out. (They’re more similar languages and cultures, of course.) Dreams seem very random, more like a monkey hitting my brain’s narrative soundboard than like a story with an author.
Leaving the others aside, I think the way you both frame dreams one really confuses me. Dreams are at best half-random—in mine there are events and preoccupations from the day, as well as recurring themes and anxieties. Some examples of mine: hiking up hill and feeling my thighs clamp up, viruses taking over my computer with popups and requiring an OS wipe, teeth falling out.
If the scenery you encounter is not you and is being constructed in a deliberate way by some brain module, surely something in your brain is constructing it, right? I frame this thing as “another agent.” Perhaps you never get to experience being that agent.
This whole part is true, but I don’t see what relevance it has?
Well, of course it’s not me. It’s scenery.
Uh, who says it is?! Is this an assumption you’re operating with?? This seems extremely questionable to me, to say the least!
In any case, I have never experienced anything like a reason to believe that any “brain module” is deliberately constructing my dreams, much less any reason to view whatever brain activity is responsible for generation dreams as an agent. The idea of being the agent that is deliberately constructing my dreams is something I find actually incomprehensible. I worry that I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, because of how bizarre it sounds, yet your comment seems to be written clearly enough—so I am perplexed about what could be going on here.
I’m trying to pin down your confusion. I only see three ways to interpret your statement: (a) you don’t believe dreams originate from neural activity, (b) you don’t believe this neural activity is patterned in some intentional way, or (c) you don’t believe whatever pattern of neural activity this is fits into the category “agent”? (a) is hard to believe and (c) is (mostly?) semantics, so I’m guessing it’s (b).
If the confusion is (b), the only way I can think of testing that is checking how useful/interesting/coherent the contents of dreams is, and this suggests that there is some intentional content in them.
Regarding the idea of being the agent that is deliberately constructing my dreams, in my rather unsatisfactory adventures with lucid dreaming I’ve had a handful of brief lucid moments where I had the clear conscious experience of conjuring pieces of the dream environment into existence by expecting particular things to be there. Unfortunately in each instance the dream dissipated quickly and I woke up, but the conviction remains: whatever is constructing my dreams is something I can access deliberately. Perhaps check out accounts of lucid dreaming on r/LucidDreaming for more successful examples.
Most dream descriptions that I’ve come across have sounded to me like the output of Magic Realism Bot, which is arguably somewhat useful/interesting/coherent but definitely has no intentional content.
Ok, this is basically what I believe too, modulo the occasional manifestation of desires/anxieties/memories. Here’s my current version of the multiple agents model:
(1) There are processes in the brain like the “dream-generator” and “various pieces of System 2″ that I experience as definitely not me. They are not conscious or all that agenty but have enough of a semblance of intent that you might forgive someone for anthropomorphizing them.
(2) There are methods of introspection such as focusing, meditation, and lucid dreaming which allow you deliberate access to these processes. The internal experience of accessing these processes is becoming or fusing with them, e.g. Focusing feels like speaking for a suppressed voice. What’s actually going on might be “accessing data and algorithms that was hidden from you.”
(3) You experience various states of mind hooked onto each process. The combination of you hooked onto process A is significantly different in terms of experiences, values, and/or personality from just you or you hooked onto process B. The claim is that it is often useful to think about these different states as “different agents living in the same brain.”
It’s (b), naturally. (Although (c) is also true, and would be true even sans (b); I don’t know why you say it’s (even mostly) semantics.)
I don’t really know what you’re talking about when you say this… this seems to me to be an exceedingly strange idea. It’s… obviously false? (Again I am confronted with that strange, vertigo-like feeling that comes of seeing some apparently clearly stated and yet utterly bizarre claim, made by someone who does not behave as if they are saying anything particularly odd or unusual. I certainly want to hear more about what on earth could possibly make someone believe and say such things!)
As far as lucid dreaming goes… it’s certainly interesting (and I have done a little bit of reading about it, though not a lot)… but if your claim is that it tells us anything very significant or reliable about the normal structure of ordinary (i.e., non-lucid) dreams, then I am very skeptical and request some serious citations. It seems to me to fall into the category of “mental self-modification”; and of course it’s interesting, in an academic sense, that people are able to self-modify in this way… but… if I tie a string into some complicated knot, I am hardly licensed to conclude from this that “having knots” is a general property of strings.
(I guess I should ask, at this point, whether we’re still talking only about our respective experiences, or whether we’re attempting to discuss how dreams work for people in general. If the latter, well—I have many questions, let’s put it that way.)
Meta-note: I tend to err on the side of overstating my confidence so as to better elicit debate. I am actually unsure of (b) at present and aware that “dreams having intentions” is at least a little weird. Perhaps I didn’t communicate that clearly.
I’ll have more to say tomorrow but for now: my models of multiple agents and “dreams having intentions” are predicated on at least a weak version of Jungian (and ergo Freudian) psychoanalysis, and it seems to me that Focusing, IDC are also predicated on these ideas (as fake but useful frames let’s say).
Whether or not dreams actually have intentional structure is up to debate in my mind, but I can say my own dreams are at very least surprisingly detailed, fruitful, and subject-relevant material to sift through for metaphorical insight. This surprise, which only occurred after I started writing down my dreams and noticed how exorbitantly detailed they are, is sufficient that I am prone to the hypothesis that there’s more than just “stream of rich relevant babble” going on.
Fair enough, this is certainly understandable.
I have looked askance at this concept (“fake frameworks”, etc.) ever since I first saw it discussed around here, and continue to be skeptical. It seems to me to be a way to verbally disclaim belief in some view (in order to avoid having to defend its truth—usually due to knowing perfectly well that no credible defense is possible), while still acting as if said view is true. I take a dim view of that, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
Now, I don’t know how you’re using the term/concept, so I have no idea if any of that applies to your views here. In particular, I don’t know what you mean when you speak of a “weak version” of Jungian psychoanalysis, nor what it means for something to be “predicated on” said idea as a “fake but useful frame”. All of these are things I’d love to see you expand / clarify, so I look forward to reading your further comments on this.
Interesting. This seems to be shaping up more and more to be a matter of interpersonal variation, yes? (For me, no such thing is remotely true, nor ever has been.)
I… have serious doubts about the idea that writing down your dreams actually works. (To be more precise: I view it as a highly non-trivial proposition, that if you have a dream, wake up, and write down [or recount verbally to someone, etc.] the content of your dream, that what you have written down is in fact a description of what you dreamed. Indeed, it’s not even clear to me that there is a fact of the matter about “what you dreamed”; if there is not, then this would, of course, make the previous proposition not just questionable but necessarily false.)
I have myself felt that the concept “fake framework” is often a way (at least when it is misused) to avoid the burden of proof, and I confess that was part of what I was doing above. Thanks for keeping me honest.
Regarding the detail of dreams, it’s certainly possible that it’s a matter of interpersonal variation, but I also believed ~six months ago that I dreamed very infrequently and in not that much detail. After writing down my dreams for a few days, my recall of dreams is substantially improved, to the point that I can recall an average of two dreams a morning with very little effort and remember much more detail about them.
Let me suggest the following experiment: each morning for three days (a week would be better but three days should do) immediately after you wake up, try to recall and write down as much about your dreams as you can for five minutes. If after three days your experience remains unchanged I’ll update towards the “idiosyncratic alkjash” model.
It sounds like you’re suggesting dream recall is “my brain filling in fake details to a story when prompted,” which seems the much more unlikely explanation than “I have dreams and then remember them piece by piece.” For one, I usually, but don’t always manage to remember my dreams. For another, if I could reliably make up details as interesting as the stuff that happens in my dreams I would write much better fiction.
What I’m suggesting is, on the one hand, not actually anything quite so specific as that, and on the other hand something potentially far stranger and less straightforward.
Before I say more about this, I want to detour very briefly to address the rest of what you say in that paragraph:
This is not at all inconsistent with even the suggestion that you guessed I was making. (There’s no reason why the ability to confabulate can’t vary from one day to another, for example.)
Likewise, there’s no reason to expect that you should necessarily have conscious, on-demand access to whatever mechanism lets you confabulate dream-recollections.
Now, as for what I meant by my comment…
Daniel Dennett has an excellent essay (which was published as part of his book Brainstorms) called “Are Dreams Experiences?” If you can find it, I would highly recommend reading it.
Now, to be clear, I am not proffering Dennett’s essay as support for my claim (indeed, I have yet to make any clear positive claim). The reason I bring it up is because in this essay, Dennett challenges what he calls the “received view” of what dreams are (i.e., the notion that they are experiences that one has while asleep, which may then be recalled upon waking, much like any ordinary experience one has may later be recalled). He offers several alternative models for what dreams could be, and explores the implications of those models, what evidence exists for them, etc.
The key thing that I got from Dennett’s essay—and from other reading I’ve done about dreams, and from my own experiences—is that we should be much less confident than we are in our standard view of what dreams are.
It so happens that I have, at one point, done basically this exact thing (it was a while ago, but as I recall, it was an assignment for one of my psychology courses in college); and a bit less formally but more recently, I’ve many times deliberately tried to notice, upon waking, what my recall of dreams was like (for example, taking melatonin for insomnia made me notice this sort of thing more, for reasons which may be obvious to many people who’ve also taken melatonin). And what I got from my self-observation was that the notion of “recalling what I experienced in my dream(s)” is (at least for me) not only mostly impossible, but mostly incoherent as well.
What attempting to write down or recount a dream feels like, to me, is confabulation. I am telling a story, but I know—as I am telling it—that I’m making it up. The details were different. It was all different—stranger—more disjointed—less coherent—but I can’t remember any of that; it’s fleeing my mind from the very first moment I try to recall it, the moment I wake; all I can do is try to fill in the details with guesses, cliches, etc. But it’s wrong; it’s much more mundane than the “actual dream” (if there was such a thing). (Indeed—as Dennett also points out in his essay—it often seems like trying to recall the dream makes the memory of it flee faster.)
So when I realized all of that (which wasn’t difficult; the realization came basically as soon as I started trying), I stopped trying to recall my dreams. I didn’t, and don’t, want to fool myself.
It seems to me that waking experience has many features which we take very much for granted, which are fundamental to… well, to being able to apprehend the world in any kind of coherent way… and which we are often tempted to ascribe to dreams, but which dreams often (usually?) simply do not have. These are things like: sequence; causation; object permanence; object identity; linearity; integration of sensory perception; and others in this vein. But we lack the language necessary to speak of experience that lacks these features. It may be impossible even to properly imagine such experiences while we are awake. And yet not only do we blithely describe dreams in more or less the same terms as we speak of waking experiences (with only minor and paltry deviations), we in fact regularly impose on them a narrative structure that even our waking experiences—which do have all of the aforementioned properties—usually lack!
So the fact is that I simply do not trust any account, produced by one who is awake, of what one’s dream was like. I have never seen anything to suggest that I should expect such accounts to be reliable, and much to suggest the very opposite. (Note that the fact that we have to describe our dreams in words makes it all the worse!)
To add to all of that, I have several more prosaic reasons for the view that I hold—other aspects of my experience that I base my comments on. One is that I often don’t recall my dreams at all, period—not even for a second. I awake, and all memory of the dream is gone instantly. I know that I dreamed; but that is all. Another is that I often spend the latter part of my sleep period falling out of and into a sleep state; certainly I am not awake enough, during such times, to be consciously recollecting anything—but neither am I dreaming (or perhaps I am, but then I do not recall even the fact of dreaming—much less the content of any dreams I have in such a state).
So, you see, I really recognize none of my own experience in what you describe; quite the opposite…
This is my experience as well. I actually wrote most of the following paragraph before reading your comment, in response to alkjash’s comment above:
My own experience with recounting my dreams afterwards is that often, they include elements which somehow seem to make sense within the dream but afterwards turn out to be incoherent. In order to construct even a half-way coherent narrative—that is, not one that sounds like it could have actually happened, but one which could even be understood—I often need to simplify things and explain it in a way which isn’t quite what happened in the dream, but rather the closest approximation of something coherent that I can construct out of the incomplete skeleton that the dream gave me.
The two pieces of evidence I mentioned are not inconsistent with your model, but they seem to certainly be weak evidence for mine.
I will chalk it up to minds being more different than I expected. If you can offer any testable predictions about the “confabulation hypothesis” I’d be happy to try them, but it seems far-fetched to me.
Again I want to emphasize that I’m not making any specific, strong claim. “Confabulation” is one possibility (broadly speaking), but there are several ways to construe what I’ve described, under some of which “confabulation” is not really the best way to describe what’s going on.
As for testable predictions, well… it’s hard to say. Certainly if what I describe as my experience is nothing at all like yours, then that’s evidence against my “model”[1] of dreams—at least in your case! My model would predict my experiences, and antipredict yours, after all.
I again refer you to Dennett, who, in his aforementioned essay, gives some interesting differences in predictions between types of theories about the nature of dreams. I do warn you, however, that little of what he has to present is stronger evidence for the individual case than individual experience is. In other words, whatever Dennett has to say, I don’t expect it’s likely that you’ll change your mind about what sorts of things your dreams are. (Not impossible, mind you; just not likely.)
As you say, minds are different.
[1] It’s not really a model, of course, but more like an anti-model—a set of intuitions / anecdata / considerations / etc. that rule out certain models.