The brain is a model maker. Sense organs relay signals to parts of the brain. Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and the nerves. The brain then interprets this sense organ data to create a model of the world. And the degree to which the world "we" see is constructed by the brain is underappreciated by almost everyone. It's typically only appreciated when some part of the brain is corrupted. Our very existence is predicated on modeling the world.

It is impossible to be opposed to all mental models. Just walking down the street requires that the input of the matter beneath what is subjectively called our "feet" be modeled as something relatively solid. Even though the atoms don't actually touch, the senses relayed to the brain make a model of "our foot touching the ground". When you look at the brain this way, it's easy to see that the brain exists to model reality.

This is because the brain doesn't have the ability to direct-process the cosmic foam. It has to create models. And these models are very general. In fact they are necessarily general, because if they were apodictic they would be useless. Models only have use BECAUSE they are incomplete and isolate the relevant elements.

Take opening a door. A young child learns to pull a handle down, and that creates a model for opening doors - you pull the handle down. If that child went up to another door and it's a rounded knob, the child may try to pull the knob down vertically. This will fail, but then the child will notice the knob moved one way when he tried to pull it down, and may attempt to turn it that way. If this succeeds, the child has then learned how to open another type of door. But now he also knows that different doors may open in different ways.

In the same way we know how to walk on different surfaces, open different wrappers and bottles, twist all sort of knobs, levers, spigots, locks, hooks, knots, and none is exactly the same. The idea of a "sheep shank" is just a modal concept. The idea of a "knot" itself is a modal concept. Anything other then the true atom is a model. My theory is that dreams take things that were learned in the day and model them. They extract the concepts and apply them universally, which is why dreams seem so bizarre.

And it's also why you don't see the dreams as being as bizarre as you would if you were awake, because you are just experiencing the essential components of the model. For example, a little child who is terrorized by his parents may have dreams about running and hiding from monsters. Psychiatrists used to theorize that having a monster in place of the parent keeps the child loving the parent in waking life. A monster is used instead of the parent in order for the child to be able to function in daily life, and this monster can be a person other than the parent. But I would respond by claiming that the monster, or perhaps a series of monsters, are used to model the concept of "escaping horrible people".

And this makes sense, because there are children who will have dreams of their parents being zombies or monsters, so we know it's not always censored. And caricaturing the parents as monsters serves to model the concept that, "my parents are horrible people". Perhaps censoring out the parent at an early age was an evolutionary advantage, because children who ran away from their parents tended to die out, and so not explicitly using the parent in the nightmare could be a product of both evolutionary censorship and the modeling process.

------------------- Begin Extreme Conjecture

That is my explanation of dreams. It is the brain integrating concepts, blasting concepts through the neurons. This may sound odd to you, so lets make a loose deduction:

1. The brain creates general models. This is why you can tie your shoelaces and open doors.

2. Dreams occur in the brain.

3. Dreams tend to relate to events during the day, if just the emotion. The brain is doing all of this while awake, and I assume it does this at a faster clip while sleeping.

Dreams could just be malfunction. I know that there are sleep cycles, and dreaming only occurs at certain stages of each cycle. It may be that at certain stages the information of events from other parts of the brain spill into the part of the brain that constitutes "the mind". These neuro-electrical patterns do mimic thought-emotions that occurred in the "mind" during the day, but they are not "supposed to" be felt by the "mind" part of the brain. When these neuro-electrical patterns connect to the "mind" directly at certain sleep stages, the result is patterns that the mind simply doesn't experience during the day, and that then results in a series of bizarre images, emotions, smells and feelings that don't form a consistent narrative.

It's like opening an .exe file on microsoft notepad. The difference is that the "mind" part of the brain is capable of processing all of the patterns in every other part of the brain, and so unlike notepad opening a .exe file, all of the patterns are discretely integrated into a bizarre and inconsistent narrative. I do not believe the entire brain is "conscious", nor are/is the part(s) of the brain that is/are conscious discrete or always the same size, nor is "consciousness" a discrete property.

-------------------- End Extreme Conjecture

But the brain as modeling theory also explains why kids love cartoons, and it explains why cartoons become different for different people. Cartoons model reality. And as the kids get older, the model becomes more and more realistic, until by the time people are adults they're watching sitcoms.

This also explains the extreme complexity of fantasy. Some nerds become obsessed with star wars as a young kid, but as they get older, they demand a more and more realistic model of reality to play with, a more realistic dreamscape. Which is why Star Wars is detailed to an insane degree, and why Klingon is an actual language.Instead of growing up into sitcoms and news shows, these folks advance down a similar path.

Lastly, the modeling theory explains why anime porn is so hot. Anime porn captures the elements of the human body key to sexual arousal. It shows the body, but none of the zits or blemishes. The face has really big eyes which intensify the facial expressions, and the body is just a few lines to show the body parts. If properly appreciated, anime porn can relay all of the patterns necessary for sexual arousal in a perfectly constructed manner, as opposed to the natural variation and clutter of a real human. However, because anime porn is constructed in a top-down manner, it cannot capture all of the charming ticks that makes a human a human, but it can come close, especially in a static image.