"The day you can explain how neurons come up with the kind of poetry that appears in these dreams, my hat I eat shall!"

Why Amos...I can 'explain' it as easily as you can explain what a soul is and how something immaterial can create poetry. ☺

If fact, I can explain it easier...recognizing that you can just shrug and dismiss any explanation as not consistent with your ...what's the word? Preconceptions? Wishes? Experiences?...

How do you write poetry or songs or stories when awake? How does Catspaw write Reg Boys stories?...or Little Hawk 'channel' Shane & Chongo? They take stuff they know from memory, add in stuff that never was - as people do when writing fiction, assemble it in ways known to stir our emotional responses in various ways..(oh, MANY various ways!) and present it contexts that are likely to elicit a reaction.

The only way dreams are different is that conscious control is missing. We still have the same memories and conceptual frameworks of how 'what was' can be reassembled and combined with 'what might be', much as imaginative fiction is written. (and this, combined with help from drugs, is how "Xanadu" was written. Would that Coleridge had not been interrupted before his memory of the dream faded.

   Those neurons that hold our concious memories, and which we access every day to remember our route to work, and how to make toast, and how to make a barred F...are always there. They just write 'different' poetry when we fall asleep after having a bad day at work and in the commute, or having burned the toast, or are working on a tune where a barred F just doesn't work.....and thousands of other items from our complex waking hours that get stirred about in those fuzzy hours when our brains are processing semi-randomly.

I could expand on this, but *shrug*... you either accept the basic idea or, as I suspect, you do not.
One of the most interesting parts of being human is our ability to 'believe' stuff that has little evidence to support it. The very same proclivity that allows us to take religion or Astrology seriously also allows us to presume that certain mental 'experiences' support reincarnation, precognition and a host of other ideas and superstitions in general....and to pick & choose among them and 'believe' in different sets of them than your neighbors do!

So...there, I have explained it. That hat you wear to the Getaway is pretty nice, so I won't even ask you to eat IT. I'll provide a small, cheap hat this October.....you need ketchup or anything?