I had a peculiar experience of heuristically testing a dream not long ago: I had determined I was dreaming, because my field of vision felt too incomplete, that

I had a peculiar experience of heuristically testing a dream not long ago: I had determined I was dreaming, because my field of vision felt too incomplete, that the balance of what I was seeing was titled too far toward interpolation versus observation. That is to say, if waking experience were interpolated from 100% throughput of the visual cortex, I was working on something like 8% (though still interpolating a complete scene from it). Looking at a wall, I thought "ha, I can't see what color it is", only to realize it was actually a vivid shade of golden-yellow, feeling the color on my retinas. Impressed, I walked over toward a door with a crash bar on it, challenging once again "ok, I can never really feel anything in dreams, so I'll just have a vague sense of touching the crash bar", only to actually feel the heft of the door, and the cast steel on my fingertips. But as I felt the crash bar, my visual sense of the scene collapsed again, as if all the processing power had just been redirected to haptic from visual. The room and the hallway were just vague ideas drawn once again from a trickle of sensory information. This was amusing enough to wake me up. Now of course, I don't know if this was actually an insight into how the mind dreams – it's entirely possible that the mechanics themselves were something I dreamed.