When you wake up after a horrible nightmare and realize it was a dream, the emotion begins to fade pretty quickly.
There might be some lingering adrenaline throughout the morning, but rarely much.
“It was just a nightmare. It’s not real,” is something you might say with great relief.
What if you substitute the word “thought” for “nightmare” in that phrase? What if we treated thought the same way we treat nightmares?
In my understanding, they are exactly the same.
In dreams, stored knowledge and memories are recruited to create a mental experience that looks and feels extremely real.
Daytime thinking happens the same way, except incoming sensory information is recruited as well. Because incoming sensory information helps paint the picture—or maybe just because you’re awake—thoughts might appear more real than dreams. But I’m not sure they are.
