Dream Memory

Just the other, we sidetracked into the subject of REM sleep in our biotechnology class, and our professor commented on how our brains actually rationalizes our dreams, changing our memory of it to make it more logical. So now I’m wondering: just how much can we trust our dream journals?

You should take what you hear with a grain of salt. One of my teachers (way back in high school), mentioned dreams and even lucid dreams. None of his facts were correct. Your prof may be right but how would you know that your dreams were rationalized? I can’t think of anyway to support his theory, only ways to disprove it, aka the lucid dream.

Facts are Facts

Care to back that statement up? I don’t buy it. :smile:

SPC1st, your teacher may have been referring to the way the brain rationalizes events in a dream. Sometimes I’ll start floating in a dream and my brain will think, “Oh, maybe the gravitational constant of the universe is slightly less today… nothing out-of-the-ordinary here.” Seemingly impossible and/or random events in dreams can always be “explained” in some way or another.

Sure, dream journals, we write in these journals, b/c we cant depend on are memory to be always right. So if you actually take the time to write them down, most people use there journal as a reference. Writing things down can help alot, but just doing that makes it concrete.(Not actual basic fact, but its yours, to work with) The whole idea of it, is we cant doubt something that we already wrote before, unless we werent sure with the idea to begin with, so why write it down in the first place??? :bored:

So what if our memories of our dreams aren’t 100% accurate? Dreams aren’t real anyway. As I see it, there really is no difference between the memory of a dream, and the actual dream.

I think there’s always some rationalization when you try to interprete experiences from other states of consciousness (dreams, OBEs, mystical experiences,…). If you really want to understand these experiences, you need to interprete them from within the dream or OBE, when its symbolism is still untouched by the always analyzing rational mind. But that’s practically impossible, because when you should succeed in doing this, you still need to transfer it to the waking, analyzing mind.

I have to agree with mystic completely, but I also have something to add.

I find meditating to help you to have a certain type of consciousness where you can be pure with your dreams even though you’re awake. With advanced meditation and split consciousness, you can always have pure perspective of your dreams… uninterpreted by your pure conscious mind.

I also find that I don’t really like keeping the journal because sometimes it is really hard to find right words to convert my raw information, causing it to be mmm… a bit messed up with “rationalizing” as mentioned.

Anyways, interesting topic I must say. :grin:

“…and our professor commented on how our brains actually rationalizes our dreams, changing our memory of it to make it more logical.”
Remeber its just one of few theories out there and not necesarily a FACT.This attitude helps in many life situations:)

I completely agree with the professor’s statement in the initial post. Dreams exist as a series of images and sensations which are spontaneously generated by the mind, and often change erratically. For instance, you might write in your journal:

“I got out of the car, and walked into the house.”

Whereas in the dream you probably just teleported into the house, unless you specifically recall the action of opening the car door, and walking towards the building. Your mind simply adds in the relevant details retrospectively, in an attempt to make sense of the events.

I don’t think this is just a theory, as you can see it happening if you pay attention. Funny how you don’t remember the transition periods of a dream very often, isn’t it…?

I agree that we often fill blank moments to create the story.By theory i meant randomless of the dream contents and saying that its just meaningless impulses of the brain.It is scientifical theory and i must agree it makes lot of sense.
You have another theory that dreams in general are our brain tries to interprete its own signals while its sorting our memory.
Then you have more and more popular one saying that brain and mind are separate and its our mind trying to give us informations,but when shifting to conciousness we try to rationalize things that are not supposed to be understand in rational way.
And then we have all those spirituall ones.
Im sorry if i made it lookin messy but talking those theories in english is very difficult

Well, im happy and exciting to say that i have dream recall! Im not sure where to put this post, so dream memory seemed like the best place. Well last night I had alot of weird dreams(like normal) but the fact is i remember alot of them, not only that i was lucid for about a minute :happy: It was hard keeping control, but it was just great to do. I hope for more nights like this :cool: