Is it the brain that produces dreams?

This is my position too although I can't qualify it - it just seems right, at least until further notice 

If your brain is so important for dreaming, how would you explain the fact that people like Pam Reynolds and Eben Alexander (and hundreds of thousands of other NDE experiences) had their experiences w/o the benefit of a functioning brain?

It doesn't seem to be possible for me to manipulate this apparently shared reality without my brain (here I mean repeating protein structures), not that I've tried it. But if you remove a persons brain they seem to stop being able to affect my shared reality. If I interrupt a nerve between a sense organ and my brain, I seem to lose access to that sensory experience. My waking experiences also seem related to dreams... the congenitally blind seem to have dreams based on their experiences... lots of eating, touch and hearing (not visual)... congenitally deaf the same... etc. R.E.M. Eye movement studies seem to show eye movements can be specifically correlate with dream experiences. External sensory data present at the time of I'm dreaming can get incorporated into my dream. Physical waking experiences that require a body, like stacking shelves at a supermarket, when these experiences are new and repetitive they often get incorporated into that evenings dreams. Concerns in my waking life seem to get incorporated into my dreams. Some reasons there...

Lots of error here logical and factual:

Your assertion in bold italics followed by my response.

It doesn't seem to be possible for me to manipulate this apparently shared reality without my brain (here I mean repeating protein structures), not that I've tried it.
Since it is impossible to have a living breathing body without a brain of some sort, your statement, in a way is moot. You can't do ANYTHING without having a connected brain. Whether that has anything to do with body movement can be argued convincingly in some situations, whether you can have cognition without  a brain is the question here, and which you aren't touching on with this statement.

But if you remove a persons brain they seem to stop being able to affect my shared reality. 
This is just a silly comment. Yes, if you cut off  a person's head, they will have a hard time doing anything, least of all "affecting your reality". More to the point- you are saying that a person's ability to affect objective reality is directly tied to their connection to the brain? That assertion carries no basis in fact. None whatsoever.  

edit- remove unnecessary comment.

If I interrupt a nerve between a sense organ and my brain, I seem to lose access to that sensory experience.
It may surprise you to find that this is not the case. Besides the many thousands of cases of NDEs where people DO have sensations but have non-functioning brains, there are cases where totally blind people have the sensation of sight.

First of all- the stargate program proved that remote viewing is real. That is vision without using ht eyes. This was also validated by PEAR in 1978. Also shown by Russell Targ (Author of Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics).

There are many other examples- see this link for more... Senses w/o brain

My waking experiences also seem related to dreams... the congenitally blind seem to have dreams based on their experiences... lots of eating, touch and hearing (not visual)... congenitally deaf the same... etc

Just because dreams have a strong relationship to memory doesn't mean they are driven by brain. You are totally confusing cause and effect here. Also there is no reason to believe that the memories which often show up in dreams, reside in the brain. I have already shown evidence that they are not. There is a ton more evidence I can provide. Bottom line is: science has yet to demonstrate a physical location in the brain for any memory.

R.E.M. Eye movement studies seem to show eye movements can be specifically correlate with dream experiences. External sensory data present at the time of I'm dreaming can get incorporated into my dream.

Yes this is true. This is how Robert Waggoner and others proved the existence of Lucid Dreaming several decades ago. But again you are confusing cause and effect here. Yes there is an experience going on during a dream. And it is possible to, from within a dream, to glance back and forth with your dream eyes for example, which causes your physical eyes to do the same. There however is no obious or proven connection between this ability, and whether the brain is creating the dream. None. . How do you possibly make this connection? Please provide some evidence.

External sensory data present at the time of I'm dreaming can get incorporated into my dream
True that. But that does not mean the sense data is being incorporated BY THE BRAIN into the dream. It is true to say that it is incorporated by whatever is responsible for the dream, and your big assumption that it is the brain, is just that,, a big assumption.

Physical waking experiences that require a body, like stacking shelves at a supermarket, when these experiences are new and repetitive they often get incorporated into that evenings dreams. Concerns in my waking life seem to get incorporated into my dreams. Some reasons there...
Yes, as we've already said, memories are able to be incorporated into dreams. That IS NOT the same thing as saying the brain does this. 

There you have it: a whole list of incorrect or even non sequitur statements that fail to prove brain is seat of dreams. That is unless, you can provide some better supporting evidence. What you have provided is utterly inadequate.

It is usually presumed that it is the brain that produces dreams but perhaps that isn't the case?  I started this thread so as not to continue hijacking Chuck's thread on dream structure.

understand simply that what you experience as your physical brain is simply the idea, in physical reality, of the projection of your consciousness into that reality. It is like forming a symbol of an idea, with regard to what has been created as the physical energies that represent the structure of that reality that is your electromagnetic energies. Your energy vibratory patterns, which will form for you a symbolized construct, which will represent the idea of the consciousness that is projecting into the physical dimension in the first place. Therefore understand, however, that there will be the symbol in the form of the interaction of all this energy that will be projected in your physical reality as what you call "mind".

What you call, “mind” is simply the physical translation of the idea of the consciousness, which is projecting into the physical dimension, you will understand that there is no separation in that way, really, between what you term to be “mind” and the consciousness itself. And that you can understand there really is no separation between all the different levels of consciousness which represent what you are, except that there is the IDEA of the separation, created to perceive, in a very limited viewpoint for its own purposes, yourself as a limited entity.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors/

A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.

Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.
“It is hard for me [to say] exactly the percentage of reduction of the brain, since we did not use software to measure its volume. But visually, it is more than a 50 to 75 per cent reduction,” says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France.

I've said before: this is the most convincing proof I've seen yet for homeopathy.

It is usually presumed that it is the brain that produces dreams but perhaps that isn't the case?  I started this thread so as not to continue hijacking Chuck's thread on dream structure.

I think the brain is involved in mediating the particular kinds of conscious experience we have including dreams. Whether you view it as correlative or causative depends on metaphysical assumptions about time, space, and causality. You can physically alter the brain and get effects on consciousness and vice versa. Mostly I go with the interface model: that there is something else out there in the ether that is a version of "me" outside the "video game me" and anything that is uncertain on the quantum level is able to be controlled or "hacked" or interfaced with. The brain is an interface that reliably (for most people) allows the cascading of tiny quantum uncertainties up into highly organized feedback loops affecting large scale physical stuff.

Certain modes of operation and certain feedback loops dominate brain function during normal waking consciousness. These dominant modes and feedback loops can block out noise and extraneous influences on the brain's quantum uncertainty receptors (be they micro-tubules or water molecules or something else). When the dominant modes are not running things, it is easier for emotionally meaningful extraneous influences from past or future or sub-conscious or higher self or someone else to be picked up and cascaded up into manifested experiences and that is what I think precognitive or symbolic dreams are. 

IMO, all forms of consciousness require a body in some sense. A "disembodied consciousness" still has a body - a point of locality with identity and limitations and rules - it is just made of some other kind of stuff. And "stuff" is whatever consciousness differentiates from itself. It is the fundamental split of Oneness into duality and then self-reflection. Without any rules, our heads would explode back into Oneness - or Nothingness if you're in a bad mood... same difference.

Although the brain may not be functioning, I think we have to accept that this doesn't mean that the cells from which the brain is composed have necessarily stopped functioning. It's just that the brain is not functioning as we would popularly understand it.

In the period between the brain not functioning as a complete organ, but before the cells from which the brain is composed have completely stopped functioning, there appears to be a temporary window of opportunity, where these anomalous experiences can occur.

Brain's and neurons don't seem to be essential to organisms, so the non-functiong brain argument, may not be as relevant as we think. There are simple organisms (i.e. Paramecium) which don't contain any neurons at all, yet they happily swim around, find food, a mate, have sex, and seem to learn. Other organisms like slime mold don't have any neurons either, they also seem to learn, and even anticipate (periodicity). There is no brain to stop functioning in these organisms, they don't have any neurons that can fire. Yet in studies, they seem to demonstrate seemingly intelligent behavior. The same goes for our own cells, they seem to organize themselves in an intelligent-like manner. Because of this, it's logical to consider whether a similar mechanism which allows these simple neuron-less organisms to exhibit seemingly intelligent behavior, might also somehow be involved in our own intelligent behavior.

I certainly think that might be the case. Larger organisms with neurons appear to be a later evolutionary step, than those smaller or flatter organisms without neurons. The neurons main function seems to be the movement of information to and from a centralized organ in the larger organism. In that sense they act as a relay, passing information back and forth. But anything which moves around in our reality, whether or not they have any neurons, all seem to contain these repeating helix like protein structures like cillia, centrioles and microtubules, and the brains networks are simply jam packed with such structures.

It's looking possible, that something within these repeating protein structures, perhaps within the proteins tiny cavities, can afford some degree of isolation to particles. And that it is somewhere around this deeper level of any organism, that my experiences arise. This and other phenomena, further suggests to me that information may not really be stored, in the same way as we understand things.

For example, our understanding of 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time, although very useful, may not be how information underlying our reality is accessed, manipulated and stored. Such information might for instance be stored in some other way, for example embedded within just two, two dimensional branes. That might mean how we currently understand reality in terms of 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time, may only be the result of the processing of information, that is actually stored in a different way.

If that were so, much of the anomalous phenomena which we discuss on here... (anomalous phenomena that I think is better understood as the dislocation of information within spacetime) might be explained. And that the current way we understand reality, may be a misunderstanding in how information that underlies our everyday existence is really connected. That's the idea that things really ain't joined up quite the way we popularly think they are. Things are connected up differently.

Viewed from this new perspective, I think we can begin to explain not just anomalous phenomena, which has been the clue that something is wrong with how we understand our existence, but on a much more practical level, it might free us all from a misunderstanding that has somehow trapped us.

Seems to me like a ton of wishful thinking going on.

But I have to admit, I don't follow most of it. Especially the 2nd to last paragraph is meaningless to me.

The idea that matter and consciousness are co-dependant is one I find compelling.

I think you are on to something.

As I think I have posted in other threads (?),, I think matter is only an experience created by consciousness and has no objective existence.