The answer to how you know which is real and which isn't is simple. You're smart. You're smart enough to know who you are, and that you're alive, and you're smart enough to understand concepts such as death, and space, and time. Time isn't even a real element. It's made up, and yet you can understand it. If you can be self aware of a concept such as time, you can certainly be aware of the difference between dreams and reality. Your question then is a ponderence of why we're the only beings capable of utilitizing such mental power. If cats could do it too, you wouldn't think it was so special nor mysterious.
A dream is merely your brain repairing itself as you rest. As it does this, various sections of your brain are stimulated and thus you see images and hear sounds related to the information stored at or near the part of the brain being repaired. The reason many dreams make little sense is that different types of information may be stored near the same area being repaired, and thus they blend together, and you create a weird circumstance to tie them together and make sense of them, the very same way your brain makes recognizable shapes out of random cloud formations. You also dream about recent events because those are sections of the brain recently used, and thus in the most pressing need of repair.
Bookmarks