 Other reasons may motivate Descartes as well. He may take the doctrine to be closely allied to a representational theory of sense perception. Accordingly, our sense organs and nerves serve as literal mediating links in the causal chain generating perception: they stand between (both spatially and causally) external things themselves, and the brain events occasioning our perceptual awareness (cf. Prin. 4:196). In veridical sensation, the objects of immediate sensory awareness are not external bodies themselves, nor are we immediately aware of the states of our sense organs or nerves. Rather, the objects of immediate awareness are – whether in veridical sensation, or in dreams – the mind’s own ideas. Descartes indeed holds that the fact of physiological mediation helps explain delusional ideas, because roughly the same kinds of physiological processes that produce waking ideas are employed in producing delusional ideas: