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Originally Posted by horn
pseudorandom ?
and i wouldn't be so sure that it's all made up.
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Well, it's made-up in the sense someone literally made it up (like most things really) but the problem is there's no real way of testing any hypothesis one might have (since there's too many factors involved). That's not necessarily a problem, there are other forms of knowledge outside of a narrow hypothesis/experiment model.
It's bending the stick too far to say it's all random or pseudorandom - I've watched a film about aliens and then gone to bed and had a dream with aliens in it. It's hardly a stretch of the imagination to link the two events. Similarly, when I'm feeling stressed my dreams generally reflect this. So it seems likely that (i) our dreams have fragments of our conscious knowledge in them (well, duh) and (ii) our dreams might reflect our emotional state at the time. Anything more than this and we seem to drift into the realm of bollocks talking though. A lot of Freud seems to be the worst excesses of literary criticism transposed onto human psychology.
Since I love analogies I'm fond of imaginging our dreams are like some sort of defragmentation process. As our memories shift from short term to long term (or whatever the process is) we get random flashes of what 'file' our brain is handling at the time. Part of our brain tries to interpret this in the form of a narrative (often after we've actually had the 'dream' - when retelling dreams it's often difficult to remember what order things happened in). So if your short term memory is full of some sort of trauma (e.g. being attacked) it's unsurprising that you'd dream about it, albeit mixed in with random stuff or stuff from your long term memory.