I learned this mostly through books on physiology, specifically neurophysiology in relation to the cerebral cortex and the intellectual functions of the brain, learning, and memory. You see, our brains have the capacity to ignore information that is irrelevant to us. The amount of information that our brain receives continuously is astronomical, and the mind has learned to sort out between the information that is important and the information that isn't. How our minds develop that capacity has much to do with the functioning of the limbic system. The reward and punishment areas of the limbic system, when excited by a sensory stimulus, provide the means to remember experiences that are meaningful to us. In conjunction with the hippocampi and other structures in the brain, the mind ‘takes’ the decision of which thoughts or experiences are to be remembered, based on how much the experience captured our attention. Experiences, whether good or bad, are best remembered when they manage to emotionally impact us in some way, while the rest is pretty much left ignored. That is unless you were to purposely set your mind to remember such an experience which in the beginning was of no interest to you, at least emotionally speaking (for example, studying for a test regarding a subject we don’t like.). The synaptic pathways of the information that is to be ignored are inhibited (‘habituation’). The synaptic pathways of the information that is to be remembered are facilitated through memory sensitization.
About learning processes, note that through making associations we are, in a way, building new pathways in the brain, so to speak, that may facilitate our understanding or retention of the information we want to remember. You can verify this through direct experience. For example, if we were to remember the concept of an apple, one way we could do this would be through repetition of the word “apple” over and over again. Another way we can remember the concept of an apple is if we associate the word with its visual representation, like how the apple looks like, its shape and size, color, etc. Likewise, we can learn about it from direct experience either by touching an existing apple or tasting it, providing more and more information that the brain can use to form an ever increasing solid memory of an otherwise simple concept. Of course, this example is pretty straightforward but, the same applies whether it’s we want to learn and remember about apples or remembering faces and other people.
What I'm trying to get at with this is that, unless a stranger particularly captures our attention (whether it's through repetition, association, emotional impact, or any other method), most of the day to day people we come in contact with will be easily ignored and thus forgotten in the mind. The contrary happens with people we know or have a connection with like family and friends, people that have had an emotional impact in us or ones we have continuously seen day after day. These people are more easily kept in memory than the rest of the population. We also don't take the time to remember every single individual that we come in contact with throughout the day.
Now, is it really that hard to believe that we could have the capacity to create entirely new dream characters we’ve never met before in our waking lives? Think about it, we can do whatever it is we want in a dream, and we have at our disposal the creative potential of our subconscious. I’m sure you wouldn’t say every place we’ve visited in our dreams is a setting we have personally been before or seen back in waking reality. It’s pretty much safe for us to assume that many of these locations are entirely new to us and most likely created by the mind itself. That many are based or take place somewhere we have already visited before is also true, but the previous case is also possible.
It’s like if I were to ask the dream to show me a bunch of houses that I like or I’m interested at. Well, I’m sure the mind has a vast amount of information regarding houses and what it is that I find interesting about them or that particularly capture my attention. A good amount of information would be taken from houses I’ve seen before in the past, information regarding colors, structures, styles, types, objects, materials, rooms, beds, couches, backyards, and so on and so forth. When the information is finally collected, the mind could just as easily recycle designs I’ve already seen before in the past. However, given the creative potential of the mind and more so that I’m not regulating whether I want to see something that already exists or something entirely new, then the mind can just as well chose from a wide variety of traits I like and combine them in a way that makes for a house I’ve never seen before in my life. The same could also apply when meeting dream characters in our dreams.
BTW i'm in no way an expert in this topic. This is just my interpretation of all this based on the information that I've read and learned.
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