Explain · analogy
Why we dream in terms of a late-night TV channel with no listings
Dreaming is essentially a late-night TV channel with no listings, where your brain fills the dead air by stitching together random VHS tapes it found in the attic.
During REM sleep, your cortex stops filtering, meaning the station manager has gone home and the broadcast is left to an unpaid intern with a penchant for surrealism. It starts with the nightly news but quickly dissolves into a grainy 1994 home video of your primary school teacher playing the spoons in your living room. One idea is that the brain is trying to clear its cache, moving memories from the temporary tray to the filing cabinet, and keeps accidentally playing the blooper reel during the documentary on your own social anxieties.
The channel is allergic to logic perhaps because its job is emotional filing, not narrative coherence. It takes a stressful meeting from Tuesday, layers it over the soundtrack of a nature programme about wombats, and expects you to accept that you are being chased through a Waitrose by a giant sentient baguette. You wake up convinced the whole thing had a deeper meaning, but it is really just the intellectual equivalent of a static-filled broadcast test card featuring a clown. You might as well try to interpret the tea leaves at the bottom of a mug left in the sink since Bank Holiday Monday.
Where the analogy breaks downActual television requires a camera crew, whereas dreams are self-produced by the viewer despite a total lack of talent.