Most of us have probably had the experience when you’ve been dreaming and suddenly there’s an alarm or a shotgun blast, and have woken to realize the phone is ringing or a car backfired outside.
How fast can our brains weave the outside stimulus into our dreams? It feels instantaneous, but that’d suggest it was merely a coincidence that something we heard/felt in real life was very like something happening externally. Does our brain work at lightning speed re-scripting our dream so quickly we wake up before the outside event is over? Or is it just that it feels like they’re happening at the exact same time and we’re unaware of the miniscule gap between cause and effect?
And what about dreams where the external stimulus is something going on in our bodies? Do dreams change in anticipation of what will happen, or very quickly in response to it?
I just woke up from a ridiculous dream that took a suddenly frightening turn: perhaps inspired by coworkers talking about yoga with baby goats, I dreamed that it had become fashionable to own and raise baby bears… and do yoga with them. Not tiny newborn bears here, but 1/3 or 1/2 grown, so they were quite large despite being babies. And despite not being a fan or yoga or bears, in the dream I owned a nearly half-grown bear and was on a yoga mat with several other idiot bear owners. Suddenly the young bears had enough of all of this and began to attack. My own jumped on my chest and grabbed my neck-
and then I woke up in a coughing fit that took a scarily long time to recover from. Now that I’m awake, it’s obvious that I have some chest congestion going on, and I’m hoping I’m not kicking on my vacation with a cold: it’s pretty clear that the cough has a real reason and the dream didn’t make me cough.
But did my brain anticipate I’d soon be coughing and spin the dream in the direction of being attacked by a bear, or did it just feel like they happened at the same time and I didn’t know I was already beginning to cough but not yet aware of it when the bear pounced?