semen stains the mountaintop

i woke up this morning, following a sickly indulgent and unsatisfactory nap, with a bit of an epiphany. of course, it's possible, someone has thought of this before, but i want to be sure to record it before it escapes from me--also, for posterity, in the event that i need to prove that i thought up this little theory.

here goes:

i think it's entirely possible, given what we know about certain sensory hallucinations, that dreaming is really nothing more than our active brains trying to make sense of outside phenomena. there's an experiment, widely distributed on many internet sites, that consists of taping ping pong ball halves to your eyes and then tuning a radio to white static. it's said that if you do this, you will start to see very unusual and dream-like images. your brain is trying to make sense of the world it cannot see--in turn, rationalizing an imagined experience when and where certain sensory information is being withheld or deprived. therefore, it makes sense that, with your eyes closed (or open but not functioning as they would in a conscious state), your brain attempts to make sense or translate all the outside sensory information while you sleep. this is why, when you leave the tv on or radio, while you're sleeping, you'll sometimes have weird dreams influenced by these songs or the dialogue in a movie slash tv show. it's something we see in movies, too. not that movies are always honest depictions of life, but the concept is still the same. a character will be asleep and hear his or her name called only to realize, upon waking up, that the person they had imagined was calling their name, in the dream, was actually someone else.

i'm sure this has all been thought of before. but i was really proud of myself for making this connection.

yeah. i'm retarded.

btw:

below is the link to the ping pong ball experiment, apparently referred to in the trade as "the ganzfeld experiment" (just in case you thought i was making this whole thing up).



http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/11/ganzfeld_hallucinati.html