Thread: Procedural Memory and Dream Content

I love football (soccer) and, seeing as it is the holidays and I had a ball at home, I figured why not practice some football while I have the time. I always wanted to run with the ball and become skillful with it, seeing as I can't make it through three steps without it bouncing off my feet or getting lost in the distance. So, for the first week of December I did just that. I ran with the ball for about 1 to an hour and a half each day. I enjoyed every bit of time I spend training, although there were moments of frustration when things didn't go as planned. I remember I tried keeping a certain pace with the ball, feeling the sense of my feet as I touched it, whatever I could come up with for the time. As days went by the exercise felt more and more natural. Then, around the 4th day of practice I have a dream. In it I'm playing football with my friends. At one point I receive the ball and decide to make a run with it. Now, to my surprise I run exactly as I had practiced back when I was awake. It wasn't anything spectacular, but what stood with me from that dream was how easily the muscle memory of running with the ball made it to the dream. To this day I continue to work my football skills, and from that day on, every time I receive the ball in my dreams (I tend to dream about football a lot haha) my dream avatar "remembers" what it is to run with it, just as it has been since that first week of December.

Now, with this in mind, it's particularly interesting how the implicit aspect of memory makes its way naturally to dreams, among the rest of subtypes. Skills like talking, typing, reading, driving, walking, are pretty much a given even in dreams, whereas recognizing the nature of the experience as a dream, not so. True, all of these examples work at an unconscious level, but I can't help but feel a certain curiosity as to why these memories make the cut, but not others that spend more time in consciousness? I guess, without them we wouldn't make a sense of what is going on during the night. On that same token, why did an exercise as simple as learning a football skill make it to the dream so fast, yet weeks and months of reality checking don't? And last, to what extent are these skills incubated for dream content? I know the specific skill I used was perfectly replicated, not so where or when it happened, or the details pertaining to the event itself.

Anyway, I just wanted to share for anyone who might be interested.