Eh, that title is a bit of a trainwreck.
Perception of external events in an organism is driven by chemical messaging between cells. This is consistent from bacterial auto-induction to human vision perception. There is no evidence of any cellular organism (to my awareness) that functions without chemical messaging (this probably deserves a whole other post with regard to inter-organism level communication).
Intra-organism perception however is entirely driven by these chemical messages, and the accumulation of these chemical messages determine exactly what is perceived. By modifying the tapestry of these chemical messages, organisms modify the content of “cognition”/”consciousness”.
Organisms have cells/regions which are dedicated to integrating incoming stimuli messages into current state information.
Organisms do not have an inherent way to “know” if something is “true” or not, they only understand stimuli and intensity. Behavior is the process of modifying reactions to stimuli to produce consistent modifications to state.
When in a “dream”, current state information receives far less input from external stimuli to verify against. Thus, the chemicals which create that current definition of state flow through various local groups, including groups which do not have the necessary synaptic processing to interpret them.
Ordinarily, these would be inhibited by state information producing an “inconsistency” signal and blocked from accumulation into the upstream maps.
Even in dreams, most information is blocked from upstream maps unless there is a high enough concentration of a particular “memory combo” to overwhelm natural homeostatic forces.
However more “intense” or “novel” “memories”, which indicate a larger production of associated peptides are more likely to overwhelm the natural homeostatic pressure and be calculated into upstream maps.
The production of these peptides is an artifact of the astrocytic/oligo write process into neurons. As astrocytes swell up during information ingestion and produce these particles internally, they are written out during rest (or for extremely intense events, persistently).
The transience of dreams is an artifact of the particles a) being cleared, and b) re-establishment of external stimuli intensity strengthening the internal state map.
The associativity of dreams is an artifact of the “memory stew” literally sloshing around across disparate local groups, creating new memory combinations that ordinarily would fail state check against high stimuli (“awake”) states.
Lack of sleep strengthens “dreams” and exacerbates “psychoses” because it allows increased accumulation of memory peptides which are able to more easily overwhelm homeostatic state calculations.
The content of dreams and psychoses are artifacts of circuit construction, some individuals have circuits which are hotter/weaker in certain, and the information stored along those circuit paths will have a similar effect on their appearance in dreams/psychosis.
Common dream types likely represent common modes of construction, for example “falling” in a dream likely represents the experience of a particular peptide group being cleared before the write process was completed fully.
Common psychoses usually split along two categories, “instinctive” fears (e.g. insects, bugs, etc), which are circuits that we are always producing peptides for, and “social”, which are usually the product of degraded ventral state checking.
Hallucinogens operate in a similar manner, degrading state checking, allowing association of peptide combinations which ordinarily would have been discarded through inhibitory mechanics to occur.
On a mechanical level, are “fear” vs. “vigilance” a primary personality dyad? Is this an expression of “ventral” vs. “dorsal” circuit strength/bias mechanics?
The primary conceit to get around on this is instead of imagining “memory” as customized electric zaps, or ephemeral combinations of zaps, imagine every single interaction is a real, tangible particle. These particles are shared between cells through the process of RNA writes between cells, which “teach” the other cells what this particle is supposed to “mean”.
The process in cells is astrocyte absorbs stimuli during waking, and internally associates the stimuli to a particular chemical. During rest, when the neurons aren’t blasting information from stimuli receptors, astrocytes begin genetically reprogramming the nearby cells to respond in a particular way to the stimuli it’s created a response to.
These bits of chemicals being carried by mRNA aren’t targeted at a particular cell, just a class of cell. As they are discarded, they encounter other groups of cells, who’s astrocytes try to interpret whether it’s “new” information by comparing against “known” information. This comparison map is weaker at rest, because it’s partially an accumulation of current external stimuli, meaning cells are more likely to identify it as “new”.
This “new” information is then ingested by an astrocyte, and it spits out a new genetic/protein program combining them, even if ordinarily it would have been rejected because it wasn’t compatible with “known” information. When the stimuli rolls back in when awake, these new behavioral programs get tagged by astrocytes as incompatible, and microglia come in and prune away these associations.
Links to relevant work go here.