The fact is, dreams seem so completely real that they regularly deceive us into an unquestioning acceptance of their reality for as long as we sleep. Why is this? People have tended in the past to consider dreams as much more deeply related to fantasy than to actuality. But if dreams are nothing more than imagination, we ought to be able to recognize them for what they are, as easily as we are able to distinguish daydreams from actual perceptions, or memories of such perceptions from the originals. Perhaps we "ought" to be able to be lucid in our dreams without effort, but the fact is we aren't. If a valid argument leads to false conclusions, one or more of its premises must be wrong. In this case, the false premise seems to be the presumption linking dreaming more closely to imagination than to perception. Indeed, a series of our experiments provides evidence that, from the point of view of both dreamers and their brains (and to a lesser extent, bodies), dreaming of doing something is more like actually doing it than like imagining it. This, I would suggest, is why dreams seem so real to us.

серьёзная книжка... я даже не удивлён, что её официально на русский не переводили..