Adonis Diaries

Dreaming has a Memory of its own (March 2, 2009)

            I dream a lot and when I make an effort I can sometimes recall the feeling and emotions of the reel.  I realized that dreaming has a memory of its own.  Very often, as a dream unfolds I have the impression that a section in the story has been shown before.  It is as if the administrator of the dream part of memory has a library of DVDs, a department specifically reserved of what have been dreamt of.

            As I dream I know right away that I have seen and felt that story and there is nothing I can do to stop it or ask the librarian to change it to another DVD.  The only time that I might pre-empt the movie is when I reach the part that affect my survival such as a very dangerous moment; then, frequently I force myself to wake up and put an end to the nightmarish DVD.

            There are DVDs where I am running around in search of a toilet but find none that are clean; it is so disgusting that I learned to put an end to the malevolent reel and get up and piss.  I am so repulsed that I don’t dare go back to sleep right away.

            I wonder if those in coma are subjected to the same set of DVDs and that when their eyelids flutter or they have jerky movements then they are trying to react to a very nasty section of their dreams.  The worst part would be if the dream part of memory has been partially damaged and the comatose patient has to suffer a limited choice of lousy and frightening DVDs that keep being loaded ad infinitum.

            I would not mind to be shown lovely DVDs in my dream that I like to see as often as possible.  The problem is that the memory library for dreams is awfully biased toward horror movies, mostly very disgusting.  May be the best way to shelve off, for a long time, a bad recurring dream is to write it down.  It would be a nice experiment to edit the bad sections, in the written exercise, and add sections that you would like the administrator of dream memory to edit for you and have a more enjoyable version.

            There must be an interface section between the “real” memory and the dream memory.  The dream memory needs refresher impressions of sensorial feedback in order to edit versions of stored DVDs.  I guess rational knowledge is also transmitted.  For example, I had this piece of intelligence in my dream that fish have no complex memory; that for survival purposes they have a dual switch of ON/OFF like eat do not eat.  If this binary memory is detracted and stuck to one setting then the fish will keep eating till it blow or starve to death. Now, I would like to know if what my dream has offered as a hypothesis is true scientifically.

            I also would like to know if dream memory organizes in the same manner as real memory.  If it is true, then scientists have an alternative method for taking advantage of the dream memory to uncover the mystery of memory saving and retrieval.