The brain is a prediction machine largely. How is it possible that you can experience a lucid dream where every sensation and interaction is as real as real life? It’s because your consciousness lives inside a simulation. When you’re awake, your brain uses sensory input to populate the simulation. But when you’re asleep it populates it itself. When you’re awake, your brain doesn’t scan every square inch of the real world looking for things to populate the simulation; it scans sparsely looking for key indicators and then guesses the rest. It’s an optimization for time and energy. Most of the things you experience are guesses. And when you’re asleep this guessing is all that you’re seeing. Dreams are just the guessing machine.

There are scattered reports of lucid dreamers who take benzodiazepines. They can’t escape their dreams. They simply wake up into the dream again if they die. Everyone reported it as being terrifying. Some reported that their reality checks stopped working; double taking at a watch didn’t change the position of the hands. The world became frighteningly real. It’s likely that the guessing machine you experience during a normal dream is not operating at full capacity.

It explains everything. How people swear on their life that they saw something, ordinary or extraordinary, that couldn’t be explained by a trick of light on the eyes or anything else. It explains dreams of course and other realistic hallucinations had by schizophrenics or drug users. The simulation doesn’t just deal with the physical world, it deals with abstract things like the “presence” of a person or entity. It’s all haywire simulation.

This idea that synapses are a part of an energy optimization is fascinating. It is widely speculated that inflammation has to do with schizophrenia, and inflammation is also involved in metabolic interference. African sleeping sickness for example is a purely inflammatory disease that causes people to run out of energy and fall asleep. Perhaps schizophrenia is some kind of metabolic knob being turned down by an inflammation signal which then results in the progressive shutting down of synapses as a way to conserve energy…