My memory seems to work like yours, I can't really remember anything specific without really focusing on it. |
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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? |
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Last edited by JoannaB; 06-19-2013 at 12:28 PM.
You may say I'm a dreamer.
But I'm not the only one - John Lennon
My memory seems to work like yours, I can't really remember anything specific without really focusing on it. |
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It's not really so much on having poor memory, since even if you do have that, it doesn't mean you can't work towards it. I know you already know that, but the thing is, there will be people who can have better recall to where it seems natural and not really too much of a strain to do, and those who try to accumulate all their power to recall a snippet. That and many factors affects the accuracy of our recall, and the swiss-cheese memory also reminds me of Apophenia, where we try to make meaning out of what seems to be meaningless data. |
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I hate brain theory - but for dreaming I really think that memory work is essential. |
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Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I'm schizophrenic,
And so am I.
So does this mean that we should all also be keeping waking journals to help us remember waking reality memories, because in case it was not clear, it's not just dream memories but any memories that seem like swiss cheese. Is it ok to forget so much that one does not really remember who one was but only who one is? For dream work part of the technique is mindfulness to the moment in waking life, but does that suffice, and how much long term memory from waking life can one loose before it becomes detrimental to both waking life and dreams? |
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You may say I'm a dreamer.
But I'm not the only one - John Lennon
I don't really have an answer, but a few related thoughts. My memory is at least as poor as yours. But memory doesn't work in the way people sometimes think it does, instead it seems to work by activating thought-associations, or memory chains. You see something or think about something and that activates a sort of tree of memories and associations that sometimes strike way back into childhood. It seems like at any one time you can only have a single thought-association chain activated, but a few minutes later you can activate another one. |
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Last edited by Darkmatters; 06-21-2013 at 06:22 AM.
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