Dreams being "erased"

[djinternet]

Have you ever had the strange feeling that your dreams / experiences in the dreaming is being erased when you wake up?

[drewmandan]

That's what is naturally supposed to happen. Your dreams are normally only stored in short term memory, which lasts about a minute. So when you wake up, your dream will naturally start to be erased, started at the beginning and moving forward in time. But if you manage to stay awake and rerun the dream in your working memory, you can move it to long term memory, at which point the memory technically becomes permanent. But yes, there is sometimes a very visceral experience of literally feeling your dream being erased right before your eyes. It's not something you usually feel in waking life because consciously you cant normally stuff your short term memory full of information the way a dream does.

[The Cusp]

I had a dream where witches were stealing my dreams.

[Taraxanoid]

Yes, I often get that feeling as well. However, if human memory is similar to computer data, then deletion is not necessarily the end of that information. It may be stored away hidden, awaiting new memories to overwrite it. Perhaps we have to will our brain into believing dreams are important memories that should be saved and reflected on just like our waking memories.

[drewmandan]

Human short term memory gets written over, so the information typically is lost. However, bits and pieces of the contents of short term memory will often seep into long term memory unnoticed. So the information is deleted, but some of it might have gotten copied to the hard drive.

[djinternet]

Perhaps we have to will our brain into believing dreams are important memories that should be saved and reflected on just like our waking memories. Hmmm... I feel you are correct... We think with our dreams. Imagine getting a dream of how to design a new efficient car engine - then you wake up and start designing it exactly as you remember it in your dream. Can you not venture that we, as a human race, think with our dreams; or a dream is the source of human thought?