Quote Originally Posted by moonshine View Post
I smell a semantic nit-picking coming on.

I have absolutely no idea how you don't consider imagination to be a thought process.
Imagination is a "thought process" in the sense that it is a cognitive activity. But when researchers say that NREM dreams are often "thought-like" I don't think they include any and all cognitive activity, otherwise describing dreams as thought-like would be pointless. Rather, the whole point was to distinguish between thought dreams and sensory dreams.

To clarify: imagining something whilst awake whether it involves sight, sound touch, smell or all of the above (i.e. daydreaming) and
actually dreaming of the experience are fundamentally quite different.

The perception of something actually being real is indeed the crucial difference. Which may be why Sleep Paralysis generally takes place during REM sleep.
I agree, except for the last sentence, which does not follow logically.