Good morning/day/evening!

I am a romanian psychology student, especially interested in the study of dreams and lucid dreams. As far as I know, here in Romania the subject of dream and sleep arises poor interest in the scientific area...

I am studying dream on my own, not very experimental and scientific, but enough as to see that my own findings have some resemblances with other well organized researches. And the most important thing, I think, is that they are true when it comes to my oneiric experience.

Now the questions I want to ask you:
What are those reasons for which people believe that their dreams are real, the moment they're dreaming?
And why do they realize they're sleeping and dreaming when having a lucid dream? What happens with their psyche, what happens in their brain? Due to what changes does that spark of consciousness arise in the middle of sleep?

I kept wondering and I think I came up with some possible explanation...

We people are "build" out of the body, psyche (in the psychological assumption) and soul or spirit. Every experience that we have is somehow related to our person, our body and our psyche.
We relate to the world in a specific manner, in fact, everyone of us has his/her own world in which he/she lives, accordingly to those filters used in sorting out the stimuli of the enviroment. So, the same object can be differently viewed, according to the persons'experience and his/her own (past) percepetions that define his/her way of interaction with the world.

But if the experiences can vary from second to second, there is an psychological instance that remains the same and picks up arround him/her those moments in time and makes the person feel as a whole, as a continuous entity in time and space.
That is called, I believe, the self (not in freudian or jungian view, generally speaking).

The self is the one who gives unity to the whole of life's acts and moments. It develops/stands out since age 3 (I think) and makes the person feel unique and in concordance with itself. Whatever we do, we relate the objective world to our subjective one, so everthing is linked to us. We cannot live something without playing a role in it, then it wouldn't be one of our memories or our experiences.

This fact makes me think that every bit of information in our brains it's specifically encoded
so that it contains information about ourself, like position, light, temperature etc., the condition in which that event took place, but related to us, the main and central character.
So, we find ourselves and we recognize some story as a part of our own experience if the specifications there present match the ones in our brains. If a friend would tell a story about us, but speaking of X and not of us, we would tell him at the end of the story: wait a minute, you're making fun of me, that was me in the story...

Likewise, supposedly we were drunk the night before and we don't remember what happend at the party we went with our friend. We'll ask him. But our memory is weak and if our friend makes up untrue stories about us, how could we say if he tells the true or not? We would think: was it possible that I did that thing, or not? If the story is not so exaggerate, and if it is close to our common behavior, we would tend to believe it, becuase we have no memories to rely upon.

When we dream, our state of consciousness changes.
We don't receive any (with the same intensity) stimuli from the enviroment (external or internal). Our body image disappears. Let's imagine a void dream. It would be only our psyche...
The dream (organic dream, as I call it) consists of (as I know and accept) a random activation of brain areas, triggered but some causes I don't know about...
Anyway, the activation of certain brain areas leads to some mental images (meaning not only visual)that make up the dream.

Now, why don't we recognize the dream as it is?
I believe that the "ego" or "self", the "dream self" ("us in the dream") does not correspond to the real self. They do not coexist.
I think that the dream ego is in fact derived from the information about the self I spoke about earlier. They are simple mental images, they cannot make the real ego do anything, because they are merely re-presentation of actual thing, they are bits of information.

So, I believe that the ego found in dreams is in fact an illusion, based upon the gathered information I mentioned. That's why we don't usually have any control over the dream... The ego is simply made up of the constant characteristic or those images, that being the information encoded in the brain about position and so on. So, the dream appears to us like a wave of impressions that grips on the dream ego and gets him arround...

But what about the real ego? Well, the real ego "sees" this images in front of him and recognize them as a part of his experience. So, he identifies with them and so it's caught in the "torment" of the dream. But why doesn't he realize they're not real? Because of the altered state of consciousness... Everything that gets to him in the dream state makes up a world that is believed to be real, because we learn through culture NOT to question the reality of things. So, the real ego has no choice...

Imagine you were in you room one day... But any link with the enviroment is blocked, so that you are just a "point of consciousness". And then let's imagine someone projecting 3D room-sized past experiences of yours. What would you do? You would recognize them and, because of no connection with anything else, you will belive they are real and happening right then and there... So does the real ego, fooled by the information contain in the mental images...

But the images are random, so they change... Why doesn't the ego change? Why do we feel we're the same and not others in real life? Memory maybe is the one who makes us feel in concordance with ourselves... But in dream state it seems we don't have access to our memory, so we buy into the info that we've got... We don't have any comparison term, so we take what we have... If we were drunk, we could have access to all the other memories of us and our behavior, so we would decide wheter something had some chance of happening or not...

BUT WHAT HAPPENS IN LUCID DREAMS? Why do we realise we're actually dreaming? If it were for the mnemonic induction tehniques, it would be rather simple to explain from this perspective. They would induce different cognitive patterns of experience and so the real ego would have a point to grasp on... He would see the differences in the antagonic way of doubting reality...

But what are the explanations when lucid dreams simply occur??? What happens inside? Maybe the projection of the own body image outside, in the enviroment, that takes place in some dreams and some mental illnesses, is a possible tendency of the real ego to separate himself of the illusion of his reality.

This is only a theroy of mine.
I hope my writing was not some spare time killer; I can't wait for your opinions.

Thank you in advance!