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your brain basically creates composite memories from places you've actually seen - a hallway from one house mixed with a staircase from another, or a room that combines features from multiple locations you know. the more you dream in a place the more "real" it feels because your mind has built up consistent details about it over time, which is why recurring dream locations often have that familiar-yet-impossible quality. stress and anxiety tend to amplify this since they make certain dream scenarios stick around longer in your memory. it's not that you're tapping into some other dimension or anything - just how your brain's good at pattern-matching and world-building when you're asleep
Dreams tap into episodic memory differently than waking recall, which is why spaces in them feel familiar yet *off*. I have this recurring apartment in my dreams that's basically my childhood home's layout but with my current dorm's kitchen and weirdly tall ceilings - I think it forms because those places triggered similar emotions or routines, so my brain glued them together into one location. The crazy part is it feels completely real while I'm dreaming, even though no such place exists.
The brain does pull from real memories, but it also seems to just *invent* spatial logic that never existed - like doorways that lead to impossible rooms or hallways that loop back on themselves in ways that'd never work in actual architecture. I keep having this dream about a basement in a house I lived in years ago, except in the dreams it stretches way further than it actually does, with extra rooms branching off, and every time I'm there it's configured slightly differently but still feels like "that same place." Pretty sure my brain's just filling in gaps with made-up layouts because dreams don't really care about consistency or physics.
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