i want to do a data dump here. did you ever wonder how its possible that you can experience vivid, real-time non-scripted (so to speak) events that are totally lifelike? how is it possible to do that without sensory input generating the images and sounds? i thought about this a lot and there is only one answer that fits: the human mind generates a model of the world and everything in it, your experience of the world is actually happening inside of this model. when you are awake, your mind looks at the world thru sensory organs and updates the model accordingly which gives the illusion that you are directly experiencing the world. but in reality there is a middle man. this is why so many aspects of the dream world kind of half-work. like clock hands changing position. your mind isnt designed to operate without having information fed to it, so it can only predict so much and you get a kind of semi-logical state of world within this internal model. most of what you experience is not as real as you think, although the minds model is designed to track and predict reality as well as possible.
but theres more to the story. there were reports of people using a drug called ISRIB, russians mostly, a few years ago. its a drug that impacts the latency of cells, turning on cells that have gone latent due to injury... or for any other reason, reasons we may not be aware of. this drug is basically used in labs in cultures and is very new. people arent supposed to take it. but some people had it synthesized and they tried it anyway of course. most of them reported extremely life-like dreams. one person reported having waking dreams that were so real that even while totally and completely lucid, she was not able to tell that she was dreaming. she was pretty shaken up by it based on the chats. i think she described it as experiencing total insanity. but this tracks. when you are asleep, your model is not firing on all cylinders. part of the reason why the world is "unrealistic" is because your brain is not working as hard as it could to fill in the model in a coherent way. think about the experiences that schizophrenics have, seeing in full fidelity people and things that are totally non existent. all of these considerations together point to the fact that we inhabit models of the world rather than experiencing sensory stimuli directly.