There was a true life movie based upon a guy (scientist) that had a stroke (I think it was a stroke) that damaged a part of his brain that stored long term memory.
He had to write down everything that happened to him, day to day including the people he met because after he went to sleep … everything was erased or not remembered.
The medical explanation was that when we go to sleep, our brain sorts information, which explains the dreams and stores it in the long term memory.
The guy had no long term memory storage ability and didn’t dream.
He lived with only short term memory!
Bummer!:mad:
Except do you really return to the same location in different dreams on different nights, or do you have a single dream where you visit a location, and in your dream you feel like you’ve been there before?
I know I’ve had dreams where I’m reading a great book, and I want to show it to someone, but then I can’t find it, and I’m looking all over for the book, but it’s not the same. Now, why did I think the book had a great story? Did I make up a great story for the book in my dream? Or did I just dream that the book was important somehow?
I have been having graduation anxiety dreams by proxy for my younger daughter. It had been more than thirty years since I’ve had the “you have a final for a class you never attended” dream but it still grabs my by the heart.
I am also in the “your brain is convincing you that this all makes sense” camp.
Keep in mind that you can still have memories of these things that would need filing away. You can remember things that you saw, read about, heard about, or even just things that you imagined. And when things are being filed away, they’re not necessarily going to be in any particular order.
Still, I think the “filed away” argument isn’t quite sufficient to explain dreams fully. The argument that it’s a free-form interpretation of limited sensory information makes a lot more sense to me. We see things in clouds and stars and inkblots even when we’re awake. It’s not a stretch to think that we continue doing so during certain phases of sleep.