Did I just dream that?
The act of dreaming is a fascinating and complicated phenomenon. I believe I rarely dream, but several people I know contend strongly that I’m completely wrong in this view, asserting instead that everyone dreams every time they sleep and that maybe it’s just that I don’t remember my mine.
[Here I am ignoring what is called ‘day-dreaming’ because for me that smacks of willful making oneself imagine things whilst being awake, rather than being involuntarily involved in a sleep-dreaming process.]
Some go as far as to suggest that dreaming is part of the brain/body’s processing of assessing and either filing memories and/or discarding them (as unworthy of being retained). In other words, dreams are some sort of ‘cleansing system’ to ensure that the individual’s memory has daily hard drive capacity free to store future memories that may be of potential future use.
Since I can remember so little of my past, maybe I don’t need to do too much ‘assessing and discarding’ of what I’ve been doing simply recently because approximately 90% of my memory capacity is permanently blank.
I’ve long ago lost count of the number of times that someone has invited me to recall the hilarious or otherwise memorable time we had done ‘this or that’ together and in response I have to admit that I haven’t got the slightest clue what they’re talking about. Or rather, any memory at all of it. They could even be making a whole lot of stuff up so far as I can judge, so if I keep quiet after listening to their tale (and thus passively accept as a fact what is being claimed we got up to) I may be subconsciously pleading guilty to outrages I never actually committed.
It could be a dangerous thing.
Don’t get me wrong – I definitely have had dreams and on occasions I have remembered them when I have woken up afterwards.
Usually my dreams (when I do remember them) seem to involve a combination of people or things that I’ve been involved in recently and them some task or quest – however weird or illogical it may be – upon which I am engaged. However, as I set about undertaking said ‘job’, first I need to stop off and achieve something else … and somehow never quite manage it and/or, if I do, then immediately find myself with another similar side-task needing to be dealt with … and so on, and so on – ad infinitum … and in consequence the original (main) quest is never completed.
Or hasn’t been, i.e. by the time I wake up.
I’ve also on a few occasions ‘had a dream’ of an incident, or doing something with other people I know … and subsequently, looking back on it whether that be 24 hours or 24 weeks later, have had great difficulty in determining whether it actually was a dream … or whether in fact it really did happen. On a couple of them I have been sorely tempted to contact someone who was (allegedly) there, and/or a participant in the relevant action, simply to ask “Did that actually happen?” – but have managed to restrain myself from doing so, simply because I wasn’t sure whether either getting confirmation either that it had happened (or indeed that it hadn’t) would be a good thing or a bad thing.
A sure case of discretion being the better part of valour.
[No doubt some psychic, or astrologer, or research scientist will now write in and report that – based on my above statements – I am plainly exhibiting classic signals of the makings of the personality of a psychopath, schizophrenic, mass murderer or lunatic.]
Anyway, be that the case or not, here’s a link to an article by Ian Johnston on the subject that I spotted today on the website of – THE INDEPENDENT