Korittke
We weren’t saying our brain was against everything we do. I believe it’s just trying to stop us from becoming lucid (for whatever purpose). About the other thing you said. Your SC may not actually be smart but it is intuitive and deceptively clever. If it can make a piano appear to occupy us and make DC’s lie and trick us it certainly isn’t dumb.
First off, the subconsciousness isn’t some second existance in our brain, it is the part of our psyche that we don’t have control over usually. This is important because the subconsciousness does not have goals. It doesn’t “want” things. It’s just a collection of stuff that is a part of yourself without you knowing. It influences you, but it has no seperate existance. It’s not an evil demon, it’s a little helper doing all the stuff for you that is much work (all the bodily functions) and would also be quite boring to do.
In dreams, our expectations, wishes and the like determine what happens. The subconscious sleep is programmed to last as long as possible (or until we have enough sleep) while at the same time protecting the sleeper of enemies (back from when we slept outside, afraid of wolves and the like). Of course this programming can be altered but usually it is just that way.
Since our childhood we have lived in a way that associated consciousness with waking and ‘remembering’ dreams in the waking state. Until recently most of us didn’t even know you could just go fully lucid in dreams. Now of course your subconsciousness doesn’t learn from this like consciousness does. If it was that logical things would alter content of the subconsciousness, phobias wouldn’t even exist. People could just overcome them by thinking logically. It doesn’t work that way because subsconsiousness is what we have in common with every animal considering we all derived from the same basis. (Animals don’t even have multiple layers of the psyche for the most part.)
Your subconsciousness stays with the connection Awake<>Consciousness and Sleep<>Unconsciousness and in a way defends this system. But defending here is not an active process. While we are unconsciously dreaming our subconsciousness determines what happens in the dream. So that if the association I mentioned above is seen to be torn apart in whichever manner, the association reinforces itself and manifestates itself in the dream, with the effect of the unconsciousness keeping a stable stance as the master of the dream.
Of course, from our critical analytical point of view this seems as if though the subconsciousness was acting as an independent being but in fact it is just a following of logical altering in the dream world based on the content of the subconsciousness. The reinforcement of the association I mentioned above is in your example the manifestation via producing a piano.
While this may be seen as ‘intelligent’, it is not astonishing that it is, considering that we ourselves are intelligent and that our brain as a whole is an almost unearthily device. Every part of the brain is working on extremely high levels of intelligence so it is no wonder that in dreams it does too. We might say ‘intelligent’ but what we mean is ‘working perfectly’.