Question.

[Delirium]

When we dream, do we borrow real faces of real people? We'd have a numberless agglomeration of faces for our brains to utilize, with the myriad humans we encounter each and every day. Countless faces stored in our subconscious minds.
Or, rather than that, do we autogenerate brand new faces? Borrowing physical features... a human puzzlepiece, an amalgamation? Say, your nose, my feet, his arm, her forehead.
Boggles me to imagine... I mean, in how many stranger's heads do I reside?
Maybe it is absurd of me to be trying to map my dream world with any form of physical reality...

[embers]

I'm sure most of the time the subconscious mind just recalls faces you've seen before... it'd be kind of hard to construct a new person.

[christcenteredlife]

that's a very good question. i'd have to say, for myself personally, i don't tend to dream outside of people i actually know.

[Korashk]

It's probably both.

[Modus Operandi]

My dreams very rarely have strangers in them, so I'm not sure. I'd guess your mind borrows faces, since constructing one is rather difficult.

[screamtobeheard]

I've done a considerable amount of research on dreams, actually. It's evidently been proven that your mind is incapable of creating new faces in your sleep, so it draws faces of people you've seen. Keep in mind, this does not mean that they're people you know. It could be someone you've passed on a bus or at an airport for a tenth of a second, but your mind has subconsciously saved the image of that person and can recreate it in your dreams.

[huginnmuninn]

probably somewhere from your memory even if it looks different it might be just a slightly abstracted feature bigger ears, nose, etc. maybe even a combination of different faces like the nose of your best friend with the ears of your mom and the rest of the face of your girlfriend...

personally i dont see how you can prove anything about dreams though maybe make hypothesis and back it up with info but i doubt you could ever prove it

[Kaius]

I've seen the answer to this question somewhere before. Apparently it is people you've come across in every day life, its very likely to be honest. However im not actually sure how its been proven, its not exactly easy or very possible to do.

[Efflorescence]

Dreams are quizzical little things.......I tend to dream about persons whom I have met or seen before.... or whom I have been trying to forget about... the latter always find a way to surface in my dreams unfortunately....

Oneirology is a subject that interests me very much as a student of biology. There are people who claim that they dream only in black and white for example or who have recurring dreams...I find it fascinating

Then there's also Descartes Dream Argument, which claims that a person can never be completely sure that he/she is not dreaming at any point in his/her existence.....basically according to Descartes, to put it in simple terms, what we call our 'real life' can actually be only a dream...now that's what I call creepy.......

[backtobackawesome]

dunno when i dream i see completely new things i havent seen before but i do sometimes have people that look like the people i know personaly so thats cool

[superstar2067]

Personally I believe that when we dream the faces we see are a combination of memorised faces from people we see and meet and brand new faces constructed from features of other people

[CryWolf]

I've seen the answer to this question somewhere before. Apparently it is people you've come across in every day life, its very likely to be honest. However im not actually sure how its been proven, its not exactly easy or very possible to do.

^ I think this is it really. Supposedly the mind takes a snap shot of every person we 'see' even if we don't focus or notice.