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In dreaming, you are not only out of control, you don’t even know it…I was completely duped again and again the minute my pons, my amygdala, my perihippocampal cortex, my anterior cingulate, my visual association and parietal opercular cortices were revved up and my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was muffled.
J. Allan Hobson, The Dream Drugstore, p.64
The Matrix is an exercise in ambivalence, and at the very heart of that ambivalence lies the Dream.

In our dreams, we are not in control. Real dreaming, unlike many popular philosophers’ fictions, is an altered state, closely related to the states induced by chemical manipulations such as the use of (certain) medical or recreational drugs. The dreaming brain is not like the wakeful brain. Normal sensory input is blocked, attentional capacities are impaired or lost, memory is distorted, reasoning and logic are weakened, narratives run wild, self-reflection is dampened or destroyed, emotion and instinct are hyperstimulated, and forms of ‘top-down’ willed control and decision-making diluted and easily overwhelmed .2

It may seem as if all of this is simply a direct effect of the blockage of sensory input, but this is not so. Instead, profound changes in neurochemical activity also occur, and these in turn compromise what J. Allan Hobson calls our ‘critical self-awareness’. The result is that even though the goings-on in most dreams would cause us (were we awake) to suspect trickery or to question our sanity, in our dreams we simply accept them as normal, as real life! One way to keep people ‘under control’ as Morpheus put it, is to keep them (in this specific sense) out of (self) control. One of the issues I want to explore is: to what extent are the experiences of normal matrix-bound humans (matrixers) genuinely dream-like, where to be genuinely dream-like is (in part) to display this dampening of critical acuity? I shall call this normal, critically compromised dream-state...