Why does your logic center turn off while you dream?

[Laurelindo]

This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. Is there any sensible reason why your brain absolutely needs to turn off your logic center almost completely while you dream? What is the purpose of that? Your brain is extremely active while you dream, so why does the logic center need to stop working properly? I'm wondering because it makes no sense to me. If dreaming used to be an important "training ground" for dangers in waking life, then wouldn't that kind of virtual reality simulation be much easier to take advantage of if you could think logically and be self-aware of your situation in those dreams? Like "hah! now I'm dreaming! now I can practice running from lions and stuff all night so I can adapt to it more easily when I wake up!".

[LucasPotter]

I don't know, but this is something I've always thought about... I'll be keeping an eye on this thread!

[DreamHighlander]

Yes, i know what you mean. It's like sometimes we have a different way of thinking, a more bizarre way. And sometimes it feels like we have implanted thoughts. Sometimes in our dreams we have memories from days before, things we've done and all, but when we wake up, we realize that it never happened.

[Joram]

I think about this a lot aswell man, i have figured my own answers on it for now: 1: Lucid dreaming is for the strong ones. If we could LD with ease, it wouldn't be special and wouldn't give that 'IM FREEE' feeling. If you work hard, you deserve a reward? 2: Lucid dreaming is in fight with the natural. The dreaming world is not the place to be lucid in, but this answer takes a quesion: WHY is lucid dreaming possible then? 3:From the day we were born, we weren't trained to remember dreams or control them. Maybe its one of those things you can only learn with ease when you're young. It gets harder to learn when being older. I want to say here that if our parents taught us how to lucid dream when we were 4-5 years old, maybe we would be naturals right now? What if our parents taught us how to ADA, how to do reality checks? Just my thoughts !

[FryingMan]

Sageous's explanation is that logic works just fine, it's memory that it missing. He can explain it way better than I can, hopefully he'll hop on the thread...

[Sunyata]

IMO it's not that logic stops working, it's that the circumstances of the dream are such a jumble compared to waking life, that our mind and logic do the best that they can with the "meaning soup" that they're presented with. The dream scene is a bombardment of symbols and hidden meaning. It's incredibly multi-layered and probably requires an equally deep and sophisticated kind of logic. When we awake, it may seem that logic was out of whack, but since we rarely fully understand the symbolism of our dreams, I think it's wrong to assume the logic and reasoning is off. It seems more accurate to say that it made sense with what we were dealing with there, but we have a hard time explaining that logic in the mundane, rational terms of the waking world.

[Sunyata]

More to that point, and using your example: "hah! now I'm dreaming! now I can practice running from lions and stuff all night so I can adapt to it more easily when I wake up!". If the symbolism your mind is working with is that "Lions" are a stand-in for something that threatens you in your daily life (eg. your fears), then it might make sense to run, but it might just as easily make logical sense to confront it, or turn it into a butterfly, or pee on it's foot, or any number of things. In the language of symbolism, these are all completely logical actions.

[Goldenspark]

Maybe it's to do with the fact that dreams are a result of the more ancient brain sorting itself out (i.e. moving memories to long-term and trying to understand the days' events etc.). Remember that cats and even rats dream, so maybe the high level logic we see as missing is not meant to be there; it's like we have the additional conscious layer on top that we are aware of, but that other animals do not have. Maybe we are unique in the animal kingdom of being able to LD - (or perhaps chimps and gorillas can? I don't know). There's another interesting facet to the "logic not working" and that is, why are normal dreams so vague and dreamy? That I guess works with Sageous' memory explanation, but it could also be because dreams don't normally have a close link with the conscious perception centres of the brain.

[Zoth]

Naturally logic isn't "turned off" during dreams: I'm sure everyone recalls normal dreams where they made use of logic, like "if that monster killed a person, it means it's dangerous. If it's dangerous, I should run" just to mention an example. On the other hand, some of your reflective thinking regions are impaired, along with self-monitoring processes (which is why in some dreams you are totally fine with being naked around the entire school) and other areas of the brain that allow you to perceive the reality around you critically. Don't know exactly what Sageou's post people are mentioning, but he's right: some types of memory like autobiographical memory (the thing that makes you remember that you went to bed 3 hours ago, or that you never became friends with Obama) are also impaired, and are just one of several factors that prevent you from achieving lucidity, several of them being mentioned already by several people in the thread 1: Lucid dreaming is for the strong ones. If we could LD with ease, it wouldn't be special and wouldn't give that 'IM FREEE' feeling. If you work hard, you deserve a reward? The brain doesn't know lucid dreaming gives you "dream SWAG" sadly 2: Lucid dreaming is in fight with the natural. The dreaming world is not the place to be lucid in, but this answer takes a quesion: WHY is lucid dreaming possible then? You can perceive lucid dreaming as a glitch. If we theorize about dreams in an evolutionary perspective, or even sleep for that matter, we realize that disruption of such processes - detrimental to the individual's health - would be a case of maladaptive behavior: yes, you would be able to determine your state of consciousness, but you would probably wake yourself up (because of the excitement that occurs many times), along with other possible side effects of "interrupting" the narrative - assuming they exist. As to why you can lucid dream, I'm pretty sure you already know why: because unlike other animals, we possess the required tools to attain that experience (this is oversimplifying it, but you get the idea I'm trying to make without writing too much xD). I want to say here that if our parents taught us how to lucid dream when we were 4-5 years old, maybe we would be naturals right now? What if our parents taught us how to ADA, how to do reality checks? You can't become natural: that's a paradox. But yes, with long years of practice it's perfectly feasible to attain a very high frequency of lucidity, even with simple tools like reality checking. Heck, there's stories of pioneers of lucid dreaming (many many years before the modern concept of it even existed) that attained high frequencies in around 6 months. Maybe we are unique in the animal kingdom of being able to LD - (or perhaps chimps and gorillas can? I don't know). Hard one. KoKo understands the concept of what a movie is, but I don't actually think she can grasp the meaning of a dream. PS: if you think about the measures your brain takes to prevent you from waking up due certain external factors, it doesn't come of a big surprise that we weren't made to lucid dream