He and Robert McCarley also suggested in their activation-synthesis model that dreaming results from the brain’s attempt to make sense of neural activity that takes place during sleep. In some instances, these emotions can become so intense that they interrupt the dream or cause the dreamer to wake abruptly. Some examples of illogical dream content include flying, time travel, talking animals, loved ones who have passed away being alive again, combinations of people from different parts of your life, sudden transformations of both people and objects, and sudden shifts in the setting of your dream. Within the dream, these strange and illogical events, perceptions, and objects are not seen as being out of place. If the dream is remembered upon waking, the content of the dream is seen as odd or even difficult to explain. “Dream characteristics and dream objects may be of an everyday nature or altogether fantastic and impossible collages of existing reality; they may behave normally or indulge in the most absurd, improbable or impossible actions in settings either familiar or bearing only the faintest resemblances to those of real life,” Hobson explains.
