Thread: The minds ability to create new places

Something I’ve always been fascinated by is the minds ability to re-create a location from memory. Before I started lucid dreaming I used to enjoy reminiscing about a certain memory or place whilst laid in bed. With my eyes shut and my body relaxed it became very easy to imagine a location I had visited before. I had a lot of happy memories in my childhood home and I often re-visited it in my mind. At first it could be difficult to really feel like I was there and the re-creation felt hazy and hard to solidify but with patience I could visualise each room in vivid detail and move through each door and room as if I was really there. This visualisation technique later became a handy tool in lucid dreaming as well and as my recall improved I began to see my childhood home a lot in my dreams as well and it felt even more realistic than my visualisations.

Since lucid dreaming I’ve become even more fascinated by this, especially the minds ability to create a new place. I find it truly mind blowing that I have memories, real, clear memories of places I’ve never been, never seen and don’t even exist. We hear the mind builds dreams from memories and during my exploration of these imagined locations I’ve seen traits here and there of things from my day to day life that I recognise, such as an object or a piece of furniture but usually the whole place feels completely new and unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Laying in bed again I have tried and been successful at visualising new locations, not to the same quality as in dreams but it’s entirely possible to visit a place that doesn’t exist inside your own head and be able to see it so clearly with closed eyes. It’s insane when you really think about it. When you do this for long enough and then open your eyes again it can even feel as if you’ve been gone for a while and returned from another world.

I do wonder when we’re lucid and experiencing these new places how much of it is really a clear and stable image? Dreams, especially vivid ones give the illusion that what you’re looking at is physically there, but it’s not? For example I walked through a clothing store recently in a dream and was amazed that I could see racks of clothing to my left and right. It was all there, I could see it so clearly in front of my eyes but upon waking I could barely remember the small details such as what colours the clothes were and what types there were. This is the same as a real memory though. I could walk through a clothes store in waking life and later not have any memory of the small things I had seen. It just makes me wonder, how complete and real are those memories of imagined places I see in dreams? Are there really many small details created by the mind that could have been examined and remembered if I had focused on them? I guess I’m asking whilst I’m stood there in this imagined clothes store is it as perfectly detailed and complete as my mind believes it to be or is it all a hazy illusion that I believe is more real than it actually is?

One day I hope to create a completely new location I can re-visit again and again in a dream. If I visit often enough and really get to know the place then maybe in time I won’t even need the dream to visit it. Maybe I will just be able to shut my eyes and visualise it clearly as I once had. If I can do that then how different is it to any other place I have visited in real life? Is it not just another memory of a place I’ve been?