I was thinking about dreams the other day, and this article I read which basically says that dreams aren't experienced as they happen, but are merely the result of our consciousness, upon waking up, interpretting the jumbled state of our short term memory resulting from REM sleep. This made me think of this one time when my brothers and I were helping each other to pass out by hyperventillating and then standing up really fast. Ya, stupid, but it worked for me, and when I woke up, I rememberred having this dream that lasted for hours, but I was only out for a few seconds. So, either our consciousness is capable of operating much faster when we're asleep, or it's not really operating at all. The latter makes more sense, seeing that sleep is, by definition, unconscious. I've also had lucid dreams though, where I know that I'm dreaming and can control my dreams. Of course that be the same thing, that I'm just interpretting my memory space that way.

This brings up a very interesting question about our memory "file formats." Most methods we have devised for representing information, take divx for instance, have strict rules that define "legal" files. If you scramble a divx file, it probably won't play, and if it does, won't be meaningful. But we can always make some kind of sense of our dreams. Our short term memory must use a language where every possible combination of the symbols is at least parsible, and usually meaningful. This would be very compact, unlike spoken languages or computer languages, which have many possible but meaningless combinations of symbols. And, the symbols of the representation must be very high level, more on the level of sentences or concepts. I think our sensory processing networks produce a kind of hash code for everything we encounter and "remember." When we see something, it gets processed and the result compared with the hashes in memory. That would explain why recognition is so much easier than recall, and why we have to look at a word written to tell how to spell it sometimes. That's my thoughts on that, but I'd welcome any input.