The Dark and Light, and the Unpredictable Thoughts

I haven’t many inspirational conclusions at present, though I have some thoughts about thoughts. I also have this thought, which isn’t my own, but is the sort of thing I’d have eventually posted even if I hadn’t read the book. Enjoy and think.

The dark is generous.
Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain sadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding us from the truths of others.
The dark protects us from what we dare not know.
Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in day’s harsh light. But the greatest of comforts is the illusion that the dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it is the day that’s temporary.
Day is the illusion.
The third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.
With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

That piece spurred me onto this: Dreams, what causes them? Why do we dream? They seem to be a representation of complete and utter randomness. As far as I can see, most dreams are caused by strong impressions left fresh in your mind that you were occupied with during the previous day or week. But those aren’t the dreams I’m interested in. They’re almost predictable. What I’m interested in are the completely and utterly random dreams that seem to have no trigger whatsoever. Or are made up of real-life things put together in the most bizarre fashion. They are so unpredictable, that the day we can predict them will be the day we can actually build a brain, which will probably never come to pass. After all, dreams occur in a part of the mind that no-one has ever identified. Our thoughts. Simply unfathomable. Their relationship to computers is perhaps a clue to their nature however.

We can’t actually comprehend what thoughts are made of, mostly because we can’t see them in operation, and because we can’t accurately define a thought. The same goes with computer circuits, yet there are many people who understand how computers compute. Perhaps the human brain operates in a way that is similar to computers? No. It might’ve been if it wasn’t for one crucial difference: There is no way a computer can generate ANYTHING randomly. There are complex instructions, intricate patterns, even some mildly random hardware, but none of it is actually unpredictable. I suppose, technically speaking, that neither is the brain. If given enough time and computing power and knowledge, you could predict the relationships between the atoms in the brain and make assumptions about the way it will behave. But there’s that minor little problem again (aside from the one that we can’t count the atoms in anything smaller than scanning electron microscope size): we don’t actually know how thoughts work. It’s a very odd idea to try and grasp. What generates them? What spurred me to make this post? Our thoughts are very random in the end after all. What caused you to dream THAT particular dream?

If you completely forgot about this post, and just lay down on your bed for 5 minutes, you will without a doubt, think about something (unless you shot yourself to the bed, in which case you wouldn’t be thinking much at all). Ever been home sick, confined to bed with no other distractions? You think the oddest things. This is the time when your brain occupies itself by pulling random ideas and thought out of your knowledge base to occupy itself. This is the time when your thoughts are broadest, when all the usual distractions are gone. Brain pulls out the thought to get up out of bed and listen to music, rectifies itself with “Nope, can’t do that, have to stay in bed”. In your state of confinement and necessity to think about something, you start pulling out topics and thoughts that are never accessed usually. Driving down lanes of thought and logic you’ve never rolled through before, in sheer necessity to think about something. Perhaps the brain has to think about something at all times. After all, it would explain why we dream.