Thread: Going to the Past

im just gonna make a uneducated / slightly educated reply here and say:

If you tried to go back to when you were born in a way, im guessing you would pull what you DO remember about the event, or what you BELIEVE it went like and use that as the basis for your dream. its not like you would see EXACTLY what happened and be able to go to your parents / whoever and tell them the exact details of your dream and they go "yep that's how it went"

^^ That seems right to me.

I tried this some time ago, and had some success building dreams drawn from very, very early memories (probably from when i was two or three, and certainly no earlier). But, as Ogodno suggested, I have no real idea about whether I recreated actual memories and situations, or just created dream schemata that best fit my assumptions of how it probably was.

What did I do? Well, for instance, here's when I made it back to when I was two or three: Given that I was returning to toddlerdom, I pretty much did what toddlers do, which in this case was climb out of my crib and wander towards my parents and grandparents, who were in the nearby living room. As I wandered, I was just looking at everything like it was brand new, absorbing every detail. By the time my grandmother picked me up and set me on her knee, asking me if I had to go to the toilet, the spell ended. The entire duration of the dream was spent with the mind of a toddler as well -- no real knowledge, lots of visual and tactile input (with no names for anything I saw or touched), and a perpective of my parents and grandmother that I can only define as primal.

Again, I can't be sure whether I simply conjured all this through expectation and imagination, but it sure felt real.

I found that trips into memory like this are done in the context of the memory. In other words, even when lucid, once the dream was constructed, I could not bring my adult psyche "back in time" with me. That might have just been me, but I have a feeling you can't reall know what it was like back then if you have your adult psyche in tow.

Apparently under hypnotic regression people accurately recall experiences their mother had, while they were in the womb. These are specific random events that they had no knowledge of and had no reason to ever be told about, but that were confirmed as true by people present at the time.

Based off of that, we remember a whole lot that we aren't currently conscious of, and we were pretty aware of our surroundings when very young. So I'd say the dream experience would be pretty spot on, any gaps in experience would be pretty well filled by the subconscious.

Originally Posted by tofur

Apparently under hypnotic regression people accurately recall experiences their mother had, while they were in the womb. These are specific random events that they had no knowledge of and had no reason to ever be told about, but that were confirmed as true by people present at the time.

Based off of that, we remember a whole lot that we aren't currently conscious of, and we were pretty aware of our surroundings when very young. So I'd say the dream experience would be pretty spot on, any gaps in experience would be pretty well filled by the subconscious.

So what you're saying it's possible?

Originally Posted by blazingnyancat

So what you're saying it's possible?

Yes it is possible. Who knows if what you experience is real from memory 100% or if it's the subconscious creating a dream environment/story based off of the sum total of your deep subconscious childhood memories. Either way it will be very realistic.