Picture a copper pool. Not a pool of molten copper. A swimming pool constructed of untarnished, beaten copper, filled with the clearest water imaginable. The water is like crystal, scattering the warm sunlight into a hundred rainbows as if diamonds are suspended within. Ducking my head under the surface, I see hundreds of bubbles slowly making their way up. I dive down below, surprisingly unhindered by buoyancy, to find their source. In the depths of the pool, still lit by reddish light reflected off the beautiful walls, I see fish. Golden-red fish with flashy fins and swirly tails swimming lazily among the greenest green algal fronds.
What is it in our brains that allows us to imagine the kind of beauty we have never seen in reality? I've heard that you cannot dream of a face you have never seen, and that seems perfectly logical. So how is it that I dream of golden fish in pools made of beaten copper? Do we construct scenes from various different sights and sensations that we actually did experience? It could indeed be that my dream was an amalgam of the feeling of being in the water on a warm summer day, of seeing sunlight reflect off beaten copper vessels filled with water, and fish I may have seen in a book, or on television.
It is infinitely exciting to speculate on the mechanisms by which the mind creates these visions. From what little I know of how the brain works, and it really is very little indeed, the answers should we find them, are likely to leave me awestruck. Perhaps some people have already found the answers, or are finding them now. I, for one, hope to someday understand why I dream the way I do. I do wonder, though, whether the answer to that question will be like what Asimov speculated the ultimate explanation of humour would be (Jokester, ca. 1956).
How wonderful and terrible is the human mind, and how magnificent and dreadful its fancies.
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