In the more interesting dreams there are personas and sets which put any blockbuster movie to shame. The communities have vast backstories which intermingle. Characters have separate and joined pasts in ridiculously complex ways. When you interact with someone in a dream, you always get a coherent in-character answer. But none of the people present have your character or persona.
No matter how feeble your imagination or interest, your dream accurately portray personas with different race, sex, religion, upbringing, education, profession, etc. These stories does not come from your brain.
For the first time in a very long time, last night I had a dream that I remember afterwards. Nothing special about it really, and it's impossible to go through all of it. For instance, the story about the chubby, middle aged, free church woman in a purple dress who got offended by a prank by another outcast character that she grew up with made with an equally purple dildo, would take a whole blog post to cover. That also goes for the trending dance resembling traditional Indian "hand-waving dance" mixed with magically appearing artificial birds, which somehow had caught the interest of many in Sweden. (The birds, was explained to me, were created through miniature chemical bags that the dancers could carry around, and when "ignited" they would "pop," much like a popcorn. Now that I think of it, it might actually become a thing in the future.)
Instead I'm going to focus on a character who was the main character of a part of my dream. In particular two words he said, and the accompanying emotion. I was at a party, seated next to a big, laid-back guy dressed in a pitch-black tailcoat and white shirt. He had a sparse, ugly beard on his chin. He grow up in Småland, which is a part of the country I know very little about. I've had a couple of colleagues from there, and 20 years ago a one night stand with a girl from Småland, but I've never been, so I can't really tell you much about the place.
Anyway, he cracked a joke with a colleague which made me think about this whole thing. The joke was like this:
Other guy: - [unintellible, but guessing something like "you heard what happened with our friend"]
Tailcoat: - Fervet, the piano-replacer?
The joke was apparently not funny enough to entice laughter, but it was used in that cozy way that worn out jokes become a nice filling for conversation. In half a sentence I learned intuitively that the they were in the piano repair business, an extinct trade in Sweden. And the tailcoat was mocking a third guy in the industry, Fervet, not present. The name is not Swedish (has an Eastern European ring to me). Fervet is apparently not too good with repairing pianos, perhaps he breaks them, and instead replaces them with working ones. Free pianos are in ample supply in Sweden these days.
So in half a sentence, and the accompanying intuition, a whole other story is told. The story is consistent with the character telling it and reveals a little bit of his vast backstory, which is partly shared with the other guy. And that's just one second of the dream. Then it goes on like that for minutes on end!
You know all this yourself. If you ask a character in your dream a question, you usually get a coherent and consistent answer (if it's outside of the plot, the answer is however usually dismissive).
So, no, I don't think dreams are produced 100% in your brain. I think dreams are to the subconscious what the Skinwalker Ranch nightmare is to the conscious. If you haven't seen the latest documentary yet, go do it now.
George Knapp's comments are worth-while too.
So, yes, bigfoot and UFO's are in our heads. But they are also real, physical things. Perhaps, who knows, even... what's the name... slender man is more than just a children's tale. But they show that our reality is not what the western world has made it out to be in the last 50 years. Dreams, nightmares, imagination are both in our head and in the world. That's why the beast and the secret "work." The extreme experiences created by external intelligences are rare, but they exist. And if that doesn't scare you, nothing will.
