Swiss cheese memory

[JoannaB]

Since memory is essential to lucid dreaming how much recall do we actually have? We tend to forget dreams unless we work on dream recall. If you asked me to tell you all that happened yesterday, no matter how hard I tried I could not make it add up to the 17 hours during which I was awake. I only remember some of the stuff from last year, bits and pieces. The memories from 20 years ago when I was last into lucid dreaming: I definitely forgot way more than I remember, and even those memories that I have I question their accuracy. For example, I remember being a good lucid dreamer back then, and some of the things I know point that way, but I remember only a very few actual lucid dreams from then and if I have any written record of those lucid exploits it would be somewhere in my father's garage and more effort to find than it would be worth it, so I cannot prove to myself whether I was actually as good as I think I was. The number of memories, it's almost like in the movie, Bladerunner, where the artificial humans had their memories planted and they believed them to be true, but found out they were not. I remember bits and pieces, and while I say I remember what it was like to be a teen or a kid, I do not really, I just remember enough to have some sense of it, a flavor. Is my memory more Swiss cheese than yours? Do most of us have such poor memory? And if so, how much impact does that have on the lucid dreaming effort, to which memory is essential? Edit: Or is it essential? Perhaps for lucid dream effort we only need as much memory as we have got or can retain, and perhaps I am just now too aware of the short comings in my memory and wish it were so much better than it is. I think about the potential of what could be done with much more memory than this, but maybe that is an unrealistic wishful thinking.