The Subconscious Key

This is a concept I have envisioned since the very first time I heard about lucid dreaming years ago. As I have not had an LD, opportunities have not yet arisen for me to give my theory any field testing. It is my hope that, when I do master lucid dreaming, I can get a group of people together to experiment with a concept I call, "The Subconscious Key."

Inception brought me to these forums last year, as it did many others, but one thing in particular struck me about the movie: each dreamer created a safe place, a vault, and their subconscious automatically filled it with vital or secret information.

I believe in a similar idea, albeit without corporate espionage or secret information. It is said that the brain can store anywhere between one and ten terabytes, each of those holding the capacity of a large library. It has been said that the brain never forgets, it stores every sensory input, but we can only access relatively immediate or important events.

If I was to enter a lucid dream and create some place where knowledge is stored, such as the library I frequented with my grandmother when I was younger, could I effectively tap into my subconscious, viewing repressed or forgotten memories? Could I see my eighth birthday party again, or see where I left that book last month? Would a place of knowledge such as a library even be necessary, or could I just ask a passing DC, or my DG?

Thoughts, feedback, and comments would be appreciated. If you are an experienced LDer, try this one tonight.

It doesn't work that way, exactly. You can't relive memories directly. Your memories will always be polluted (or enriched!) by dream content. Dreams, themselves, are amalgamations of your memories. Your brain does not archive things cleanly like a library or computer system. You can direct the flow of your dreams or memories to a certain subject or a certain time in history, but you will pull up the entire schema. Anything connected with that subject could make an appearance.

This is not always a bad thing. It actually gives us a richer learning experience. Instead of just remembering your eighth birthday, you will remember everything in your life you have ever connected to that birthday. Emotions, symbols, similar events, metaphors. Often, the most ridiculous and seemingly out of place object in a dream is the most important.

I get what you mean, and I didn't really expect to just stroll over to the shelf labeled "January-June, 2004." I was thinking more along the lines of emotional involvement and lost things. Maybe even more obscure concepts such as studying in a dream, or archiving your brain, as it can't do it itself. I didn't explain myself as clearly as I had hoped. The Subconscious Key is not intended to be a central idea or theory necessarily, but more like the Fringe department of Dreamviews: impossible until proven otherwise. :D

Sounds a lot like you are aiming for Recapitulation. Recapitulation (Castaneda) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Recapitulation is a term used by Carlos Castaneda in his book, The Eagle’s Gift, published in 1982

I learned lucid dreaming from his books by "looking for my hands" in a dreams like he did, as explained in his books.

So,
although I have never completed the Recapitulation task myself (yet) - I sure think it is possible in lucid dreaming.:)


I agree with this -> "It has been said that the brain never forgets, it stores every sensory input, but we can only access relatively immediate or important events."