Reliving, and the subconscious

[mrToad]

some ideas here. i'm kind of in favor of the subconscious over the conscience in dreams because the subconscious holds a lot more than we consciously know. i don't know about you, but i've learned everything we ever experience is retained in memory. it is the act of recollection that we are weak at. things that make impressions are the things we more likely recollect, remember. if our subconscious holds all kinds of memories from childhood, i have an idea. simply to ask yourself (your subconsious) while dreaming to show you something, anything, from your far past. relive it. experience it again in first person. hear your mother's words again for you not to run off too far while they picnic by the edge of the forest. if we could ask our subconscious to work for us, it could do a lot of things. along these lines, think about the saying 'practice makes perfect'. take playing a video game for instance, or playing guitar. generally, masters at what they do are able to finally do it without thinking. they get to a point their subconscious is doing the work. as they feel it, it happens. no more do the hands do the work consciously, but the mind and heart do it, at such speed and perfection it makes you wonder. in chess, in oil paints, in auto mechanics, we're really only 'hot' when something is speaking to us from a deeper place. we feel from intuition that blue needs to go here, that the next move should be placed there. back to the point. the subconscious works off of what it has experienced. and experience wells up inside us daily, every moment as long as we live. the subconscious connects like lightning to very deep places sometimes, and it can amaze us. if all our experience is deep within, access to it is an awesome thing. so, in dreams, asking it to reveal something we know but can't connect to consciously allows it to take over, and then reveal something to us.

[DuB]

i don't know about you, but i've learned everything we ever experience is retained in memory. it is the act of recollection that we are weak at. Cognitive psychologists would insist otherwise. Unfortunately, our memories do not work like filing cabinets in which we store and retrieve intact memories. In fact, memory is surprisingly unreliable and even highly malleable. Some things never successfully make it into memory. Some make it in for a time but simply disappear. Also, we tend to reconstruct memories as we retrieve them.

[mrToad]

yea, i'm not one to say. interesting topic, tho i generally don't enter the big debate circles. probably everything is not retained. but i think a lot more than we think is. some examples... someone brings something up you may never have remembered on your own. the time your aunt spilled tea on your wife's wedding dress that humid summer evening. then you remember something else, how the steak was overcooked. and in conversation with this person, you start pulling up memory after memory. each one clicks with both persons. each one triggers something else. like a string you pull one, and get many more where it came from. it's like by one thread you got into the subconcious, something residing hidden for years. i think in comparison, it's our recalling that's weaker than our storing, on average. that's how i feel at the time anyway. in a moment of pressure we can forget our best friend's name. where did it go? it can't be accessed because our mind is too busy with other processes, a frantic nervous wreck perhaps. but in lucid dreaming, maybe we have access to a lot more. perhaps not everything, but so much is there hidden.