I, like Kenny Nolan, like dreaming. It’s always fun to see what my brain has in store for me each night when I go to sleep. I don’t go for dream interpretation, though. I am interested in how dreaming works. When possible, I try to analyze a dream by figuring out where all the elements come from. Some questions arise:
How detailed a map of the brain can be made? If you hook up someone’s brain to a monitoring device and the subject thinks only of a single object and that part of the brain is noted, could you “stimulate” that part of the brain a force the image into the subject’s “mind”? Kinda like when surgeons stimulate the brain during brain surgery.
Let’s say you map out your brain today. Ten years later you re-map it. Would some things you never forget (tying your shoes, telephone numbers, directions to work, etc) stay in the same place? What about stuff you have forgotten? Would new stuff replace old stuff? What if you have something stored in your brain that you forgot, but it’s still there? Imagine a file on your computer whose name you have forgotten, but see it while searching for something else.
If you could “record” a dream, would you?
Dream on…
Re 1 and 2: You can map the brain, sort of, but there doesn’t seem to be any local storage of ideas. Motor areas and direct sensory stuff are pretty localized, but memory is spread all over a large area, as far as we can see. (Some people have talked about memory being “holographic”, but that strikes me as more of a metaphor than an explanation of the way things really work.) Forgotten stuff is probably not over-written at any one time; it more likely just blurs into the background, maybe being absorbed into more general ideas.
Re 3: Hell, yes! Like you, I enjoy looking for the sources and trying to figure out the ‘plot’ (not that the plot necessarily makes any sense).
It’s been my personal experience that my memory in general improves whenever I spend a period of time consistently keeping a dream journal and doing other things to strengthen dream recall. My WAG on why this is (if it is, I could just be imagining it) has been, forgotten stuff is often still in the brain, however, the pointers to it have been lost. Organically speaking, the pointers seem to be the particular arrangement of relative strengths of pathways, as best this layman grasps modern neuroscience. Dreams being essentially random spreading impulses throughout the whole structure, memories of dreams link up to pathways that in turn also link up to other memories entirely–often forgotten-but-still-there ones as well. Thus, when you remember more dreams, you remember more stuff in general.
As for recording dreams, absolutely. I’d like to see some of the ones I have in those chunks of sleep I never even get a shot at remembering on waking.