Dreams and Mental Illness

A few thoughts:

First off,
The bible says (some) dreams come from God. The Matrix movie has dreams coming from a computer program. The children's song Row your boat says Life is but a dream. Morpheus, from mythology, is the God of dreams. I personally believe (most of) my dreams come from an imaginative "other," sent to my brain like radio waves to a radio/tv programs to a television/telepathy in a visual and auditory, mostly, form. I dream in color. I often remember my dreams. I have a theory that dreams prime us for the day ahead, or possibly further into the future, a kind of programming, perhaps. I have a theory that many of my dreams come specifically from David Eldridge, the same guy who's the voice in my head. Unlike the day, however, I don't care what imagery I get at night -even nightmares. I actually kind of like nightmares. Just like I like earthquakes, in real life. I also like it when it rains. But I do want privacy in my head during the day, Day-vid.

Wikipedia has some theories: Activation-synthesis, Continual Activation, Memory, and Functional. While I'm sure this has some relevance to my experience, I still believe my sleeping virtual reality to be based primarily on telepathic linkage, which I realize is not the common view.

Dreams and psychosis
A number of thinkers have commented on the similarities between the phenomenology of dreams and that of psychosis. Features common to the two states include thought disorder, flattened or inappropriate affect (emotion), and hallucination. Among philosophers, Kant, for example, wrote that ‘the lunatic is a wakeful dreamer’. (Does that make Martin Luther King, Jr. a psychotic?). Schopenhauer said: ‘A dream is a short-lasting psychosis, and a psychosis is a long-lasting dream.’ In the field of psychoanalysis, Freud wrote: ‘A dream then, is a psychosis’, and Jung: ‘Let the dreamer walk about and act like one awakened and we have the clinical picture of dementia praecox.’

McCreery has sought to explain these similarities by reference to the fact, documented by Oswald, that sleep can supervene as a reaction to extreme stress and hyper-arousal. McCreery adduces evidence that psychotics are people with a tendency to hyper-arousal, and suggests that this renders them prone to what Oswald calls ‘micro-sleeps’ during waking life. He points in particular to the paradoxical finding of Stevens and Darbyshire that patients suffering from catatonia can be roused from their seeming stupor by the administration of sedatives rather than stimulants.