I like to think of dreams as our brains' leisure time, an opportunity for them to do whatever they want to do, unencumbered by the demands of sensory processing or conscious thought.

However, that doesn't mean our brains necessarily take it easy. Indeed, I've noticed what I would consider considerable cognitive load in certain dreams.

Here's a great example. I recently had a dream in which I was at a party, playing a game with some friends. We had to come up with a silly name for a person, given their profession. I was assigned "dentist," and so I thought through some possibilities: Paul A. Tooth, Paula Tooth, Paul M. Out, Paul M. Allout, etc.

Then another person at the party, who was assigned "obstetrician," announced the silly name they had come up with, and I chuckled at it.

What's fascinating to me is that until they announced the name, I had no perception of the critical thinking necessary to construct it -- even though it was my own brain that was creating it! Somehow, as I was perceiving myself thinking up silly dentist names, another part of my brain was simultaneously thinking up silly obstetrician names, but I could only perceive the thinking about dentists.

Isn't it fascinating that our brains can pull that off?