I've had lucid dreams on and off for several years. I remember one particular dream where I was visiting a friend, and he showed me a project he was working on in his back room. It was a hand-cranked machine that looked like a mashup of an astronomical orrery and an automatic transmission with the case taken off. Before I woke up, I was able to examine it for some time, and as far as I can recall, I could see each piece, in motion and interacting with its adjacent parts, with perfect resolution.
Now, the problem is that there was never an image of that machine on my visual cortex, so it must have originated somewhere further up the stack in some kind of symbolic form, which got used to synthesize the image I thought I was looking at. IMHO, it's a little bit backwards for my brain to have to repaint memories on an imaginary canvas so the little man in my head can look at them and reparse them over and over. (But apparently it does, and it's damned good at it.)
Now, the problem is that there was never an image of that machine on my visual cortex, so it must have originated somewhere further up the stack in some kind of symbolic form, which got used to synthesize the image I thought I was looking at. IMHO, it's a little bit backwards for my brain to have to repaint memories on an imaginary canvas so the little man in my head can look at them and reparse them over and over. (But apparently it does, and it's damned good at it.)