On writing that down I realised how we are told we think.
The terms think, thinking, thought, are all referring to an image-making process. Imagination – the process by which we make “pictures in our heads”. There is in fact, no such thing as “a thought”. Not stand-alone, by itself. So, we could say the terminology is false, either deliberately or by not understanding the process.
We cannot know about thought/imagination until we are self-conscious. The pictures we then see, however abstract, are the effect of a chemical response sourced in our bodies to an external stimulus.
The pictures we see in dreams are not our thoughts, but real experiences in alternative ‘dimensions’. When we recall the dream, our thoughts (chemical responses to external stimulus) then assess the dream and construct them into something tangible that we can understand.
The pictures produced to understand the dream are how the chemicals communicate to the self-conscious. Or to put it in sequence; it is how we are aware we had a dream. The self-conscious assigns pictures to chemicals and then, when those chemicals are produced in the body, the pictures present themselves to the self, so they can become conscious of their ‘thought’.