By definition, if they were, you wouldn’t be aware of them and wouldn’t remember them. Lots of people dream (and it can be verified with brain scans) without remembering them.
Can you consciously start to dream whenever you want? Otherwise I'd say that they are invoked by a subconscious process.
Also forgetting something doesn't mean that the memory was never there. Even people who remember their dream directly after the night usually quickly forgets about them afterwards, you don't remember most of your dreams from a week ago, so that is easily explained by just saying that they cleaned up the memory of their dream before they woke up.
I'm very good at that though, as I said it is just a process that is asking you questions, and just like you can steer a conversation with what you say you can steer where that process takes the dream by how you behave in it. It will continue asking you about the stuff until it is no longer curious about the situation, and when it is it will steer the dream (conversation) to some other subject, putting you in some completely different environment etc.
I'm not sure why that interpretation is so hard to believe. And I think that process also does a lot of computation that doesn't need to ask the conscious parts about anything, in those cases you wouldn't dream, its just doing something else.
If, as you say, you are aware of something, it is by definition now in your conscious mind. The idea that it originates somewhere else is not a new concept. Buddhists have been claiming “thoughts think themselves” for a long time.
> If, as you say, you are aware of something, it is by definition now in your conscious mind
Yeah, but that is a trivial statement, we all know that "thoughts popping into our head" means that they came from somewhere, I'm not talking about that effect.
To me the difference is like between a function call and a process. The dream is some other part of the brain that wants to know something that you are good at answering, so it asks you that question by posing it in a language you understand, ie the "dream", and then you answer by reacting to the dream, it isn't waking you up it is just making a quick invocation. This is different than what you are talking about, unless I misunderstood you completely.
When you are awake it is more that you are querying the other systems and they put thoughts in your mind as responses. Those responses will be calculated before you are aware of them, creating the "you made the choice before you think you did" effect, but you are still querying them. While when you dream those systems query you and you answer back with your reaction to the dream, meaning you have basically no control at all, and the shape and feel of the dream, when to dream, what to dream etc is decided entirely by that other part.
Or in other words, "dreaming" would be the feeling of being the subsystem others are querying, while "awake" is the feeling of being the main system that is querying others. And just like you ask your subsystems a lot of questions for all sort of reasons, I don't see why our other systems would have just one reason to ask us anything, they probably ask all sort of things for all sort of reasons, as long as querying you for information is useful to them they will do it.
What exactly do you mean by “being” when you talk of “being the subsystem”? What I’m relating is that the very act of “being” (I.e., having a subjective experience) is rooted in the conscious mind. So there’s a natural contradiction that you are somehow “being” the subconscious, because the subconscious is “below conscious experience.” Maybe you have a different definition of subconscious which is why I keep pushing on getting away from wishy-washy usage of the terminology.