Having two memories leading up to same event in dream????

**Intergalacticus** · 12-14-2015 12:19 AM

Anybody ever experience this? Like when you go to write in your dream journal the next day, you realize that in your dream you have two different memories. Like for example the other day I was dreaming that I was in a van driving backwards being shot at by russian mobsters, but at the same time I have a memory that the van wasn't a van, it was a motorcycle. Huh????? And the person I was with was another person. What?????
Anybody ever get that happening to them? How do you journal about something like that, in a way that is explainable in written language?

**Sageous** · 12-14-2015 05:56 AM

^^ Sure, I bump into that phenomenon often; it's probably more common than you might think.

This probably happened because your dream recall was working well for that dream, and you happened to notice that the imagery in your dream was shifting even while a single story was being told. Dream imagery is fairly random, and tends to shift often and occasionally dramatically during a dream, so it's no surprise that you might be driving a van one second and a motorcycle the next. Upon waking, though, your memory seeks the most plausible story to remember, so it will tend to "block out" details of a dream that don't quite correspond to a reasonable plot.

So, if you were remembering that dream normally, you probably would have only remembered the van, skipping the bike bits altogether -- it just makes more sense that way. But, given that you are remembering your dreams with the added focus of someone interested in all the details, you found yourself remembering two sets of imagery that seemed to overlap.

I would see this as a good sign, because it shows that your recall is pretty thorough. Also, this is one reason I always recommend writing down all the details you can remember in a dream, instead of just basic themes or imagery: there may be a whole lot of other stuff hiding in your memory, waiting to be found.