the subconscious and dreaming, a neurological perspective

Imo, the idea of 'the subconscious' as some kind of single entity, a psychic agency unto itself, is a dusty old relic from the hayday of psychanalysis before science got a foot in that realm and cleaned things up. Rather, I'm starting to think there are vastly many (both interrelated and unrelated) unconscious processes in all different parts of the brain. In fact, probably the VAST majority of brain activity is unconscious, and what we experience as consciousness is just the sequence of unconscious 'ideas' that are broadcast 'loud' enough and 'wide' enough to make their mark visible.

Anyway, along my view, dreams are not messages from our inner unconscious selves, but are chaotic byproducts of waves of neural activity emanating from the pons in the brainstem to the thalamus to the visual cortex where they are channeled along our own unique neural structures. These neural structures are shaped by our experiences and thoughts - basically everything, who we are - and thus the way they intern shape the flow of information has a special meaning for us. That is at a very general level. A further idea that fits into this which I find compelling is that dreams are an aggregation of hallucinations and operate according to the same principles/mechanisms. We gather a picture of the world through a recursive process of questioning which spontenously generates interpretations of incoming information. When our questioning process goes awry due to psychopathology, we hallucinate - ie we may be extremely paranoid about people watching us so for every dark shadow in the corner of our eye our brains will ask the question 'is that somebody watching me?' and associated questions until it hits upon a piece of information congruent with that preconcieved theory and in that process the thing comes alive right out of our imagination! LSD amplifies this nicely! To apply that to dreaming, the visual cortex is being given nonsense stimulation (because it's not from the eyes, but sleep-asssociated activation in the brainstem) but it wants to make sense of that, in the only way it knows how - visual scenes. (Of course, this is true of other senses, but vision is one of the most notable features in dreams, at least in my experience, but I may am a very visual person so I dunno). Just as in waking life, we have certain 'expectations about what information will be' and so we apply the same sorts of questions to this 'nonsense information'. This is the locus of meaning. This is where the way our individual brains are wired up (with all our hopes, anxieties, fantasies, convictions etc) impart significance by shaping the questioning process which gives rise to dreams (hallucinations sans sensory data).

I am still hanging for a theory of lucid dreaming.

At any rate, to me the central feature of lucid-prep seems to be gradually encoding a sensitivity to the dream state - that is, cultivating a 'questioning process' more likely to ask questions about whether an experience is real or imagined. Perhaps if the distinction between conscious in unconscious is far more fluid and quantitative rather than qualitative (what I believe), then once the question 'is the a dream' is processed affirmative, then that could trigger a wider cortical circuitry writing large the dream experience. A cascade effect pushing the imaginings further into what we call 'consciousness'. Just speculation here of course!

Sorry when I write hurredly I tend to be more dogmatic and stuff, especially when I'm feeling slightly manic after being low for a while... Plus these ideas are actually quite new to me (although I feel like I knew them all along). I don't know if/how they circulate around here..

Any responses appreciated!
Wednesday