Lee -
Good lord, Frank. Surely you are teasing me. How could your memory of a
dream not be accurate?!
I thought it was widely believed by Psychologists (as it is certainly believed
by *me*) that
one commits an error (a category error, perhaps? or an error of attribution?)
if one thinks of
"a dream" as some thing that existed--or some act that was undertaken--before
one awakes,
which can thereafter be "remembered"; rather, the behavior that one (mis)names
"remembering
the dream I just awoke from" is actually the conjunction of two
behaviors--"dreaming while
half-awake" and "attributing the quality of 'rememberance of the past' to
'awareness of an on-
going behavior'" (pardon the awkward phrasings). Of course, often one also
"thinks about a
dream" when one is fully awake (or going back to sleep), and that behavior may
be (or
incorporate) actually remembering an earlier behavior of the previous type.
Damn fine articulation of this belief/perspective. I am a connoisseur
of hypnagogic and hypnapompic states and often deliberately arrange my
life for it to be a little slow in falling off and waking up for these
reasons.
I have examples of dreams where the real world impinged (sounds or
smells) which I incorporated into the linearized, causal experience of
the dream out of time.... meaning I "made up a good reason leading up
to an event in the dream that fit the data"... for most... practical
purposes, I am "remembering" a compressed virtual real-world experience
that I "had"... but I ascribe to the ideas you present that such
memories aren't what they seem to be.
And I liked your contrast between the two extremes in a forum such as
this of "vacuous" vs "rambling"...
- Steve
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