The Topology of REM Mentation (Dreams): Attractors, Affective Projections, and the Dual-Regime Architecture of Consciousness
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) February 23, 2026 Boris Kriger
This monograph presents a unified mathematical framework for analyzing dreaming (REM mentation), comprising 21 components with formal definitions, propositions, proofs, and seven computational toy models. The framework treats the brain as a generative system whose output during sleep exhibits structural properties like local coherence with global inconsistency, lazy specification of detail, drifting relational structure, virtual complexity, affective saturation, and near-total content loss at termination. The relationship between model and actual dreaming is analogous to that between the Ising model and ferromagnetism—capturing structural regularities without claiming ontological identity. Components include a dual-regime model of consciousness, topological attractor theory, affective projection, dream amnesia formalization, and correspondence with large language model idle generation.