[Morrigoon]

You know how you'll be struggling to remember something, a word or a name, and you can't think of it, but then, like 3 days later, it'll suddenly pop into your head and you'll randomly say it out loud?

The mind, when set on a task, usually keeps working at it. Some tasks, you don't know you've set it on. For example, a task might be to process the stress you feel about an upcoming event and make some sense of it. So you start having vivid chasing dreams in which two faceless bad guys are chasing you around an abandoned riverboat in a dark swamp trying to steal your bottle of vanilla conditioner. But what I think this really is is the visual representation of your brain's filing and processing systems - the hard disk and the memory working in tandem, if you will. All this goes on all the time as your brain reaches back to fetch items you request of it, but because we exist in the conscious when we're awake, we aren't aware of it. When we sleep, we get to "view" the workings of the subconscious.

Look at it this way - imagine your memory was a file box full of printed LoT threads. Now imagine you were trying to remember the thread title of, let's say, my hot chocolate poem. So you're flipping through the files, and on the way, you come across EH's quote where Mark Twain takes a jab at congress. Then you hit upon the geek t-shirt thread where Tito's kitten links you to a t-shirt that says Pirates are better than Ninjas. And you come across several threads that mention the gold Mickey ears for the 50th. Well, the way you might "see" this in your dream is that Mark Twain is a member of congress, and everyone else in congress is a bunch of idiots, and they're all yelling and screaming like Britain's House of Commons during a "debate" on whether pirates or ninjas are better, and somehow this decision is critical if they're going to be able to acquire the gold Mickey ears, an anticipated national treasure, but the whole thing is finally resolved when someone serves hot chocolate.

This is also why some dreams make more sense than others. In some dreams, you're flipping through random files because your brain is hoping to find something specific within them, and in other dreams, you're literally processing information. If you were thinking about some friend of yours and wondered "what would happen if....", your brain might not know to stop processing this when you move on to another task. You might consciously have forgotten wondering it, but lo and behold, that night you have a really strange dream about marrying some friend of yours to whom you're not remotely attracted. Or you might have a dream where your brain is wondering "what would happen if... something went wrong at my speech next week" and so your brain, in its own inimitable way, comes up with a scenario in which something goes horribly wrong (though why 50-year old bar chicks in liederhosen would bring pickles to your product proposal, no one can explain), in order to give it a chance to figure out how you'd deal with it - to literally prepare you.

Anyway, that's my take. I believe there's a spiritual side too, but it's rare.