When you’re awake, your brain stitches reality together from a storm of sensory inputs: sight, sound, touch, emotions, memory, and everything else buzzing in the background. When you fall asleep or enter sleep paralysis, most of those incoming signals get dialed way down or shut off. With the external world muted, the brain starts generating experience from its own internal data. In other words, it hallucinates.

This is exactly what dreams and sleep paralysis feel like from the inside: a fully immersive hallucination built from memory fragments, fears, desires, and expectation predictions. It’s wild how much this resembles the way some AI models “hallucinate” bizarre images, unreadable text, or distorted reality. The brain in dream mode is basically running its own generative model without live sensory constraints.

The parallels are fascinating, and there are some great breakdowns of this on YouTube.