I would’ve put this is GQ, but I don’t know if a factual answer exists, so here we go:
I try to remember my dreams whenever possible and then try to figure out where the individual elements come from in my memory. For example, I have recurring dreams about school. It’s not just one school, but bits of every school I’ve attended. Same goes for any dream involving cars. Bits and pieces of various cars come together into some sort of auto-mutation.
This makes me wonder how memories are stored in the brain. Would like memories be located near each other? Or perhaps each memory has some sort of tag?
Opinions? Links?
FTR, I don’t believe dreams mean anything unless you want them to.
I want to know how I ended up dreaming that I was a renegade quantity surveyor, who broke into places in the dead of night and counted piles of stuff.
I got over the walls by standing on a large yak. Thus, a popular cartoon series was made (in the dream) about me, called 'Surveyor Jack and his Recalcitrent Yak".
Needless to say, I’m not called Jack, nor do I have a yak. Frickin’ weirdest dream I’ve ever had…
Well, when you’re dreaming, your usual logic faculties shut down. This gives you a sort of “perfect imagination”: Anything can be combined no matter how silly. When we’re awake, we* have trouble coming up with things that bizzare since its impossible* to remove our logical thinking even when we use our imaginations.
(*Of course, different people have different levels of imagination. Some people, drug and alcohol free, can come up with some pretty bizzare stuff. I, personally, would say that I have a pretty active, unbounded imagination.)
They may be grouped together such that (for example), the different schools you’ve gone to fit under the more general category of ‘School.’ I don’t know that it has anything to do with proximity in the brain, probably more about how ideas are organized.
Interesting that you ask about memory storage, though, because one hypothesis is that dreams may exist to help us process and store information.
