A Real Dream

In many cases, getting to the recesses of my mind to share an experience is a hard task by default unless something on the outside world triggers the memory of that experience to surface into the superficial layers of the mind.

I think the linkage between the depths and the surface via the outside world is a good background towards understanding how much wiggle room there is to fill in the gaps with whatever narrative one's present self needs the past to have been.

The more time passes, the less clarity there is for the edges of what really happened.

Although it's very very uncommon, I do sometimes find it hard to tell whether a past experience happened in reality or it was merely just a dream.

Given we mostly and generally forget our dreams, such a remembered dream must be an outlier of sorts to be triggered back into surface and also it has to be more realistic than fantasy for there to be this uncertainty to label a dream a reality in the first place.

If I remember correctly, this mechanism has something to do with how memories consolidate during sleep. The brain doesn't neatly file dreams and real experiences into separate folders. They're processed through similar neural pathways, encoded with similar emotional weight.

If a dream felt emotionally true in the moment, my brain might timestamp it with the same markers it uses for real events. Years later, when I'm trying to recall whether that conversation actually happened or I just vividly dreamed it, there's no metadata to check.

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I've had a few of these over the years. One involves a specific summer afternoon, at the beach, high tide, and a conversation with my childhood friend that seems important but also... too perfectly symbolic? Too neatly wrapped? The kind of thing that makes me suspicious. Did he really say exactly that, or did my sleeping brain craft it maybe because I needed to hear it?

I can't tell really, and worst part is asking doesn't always help. Sometimes the other person doesn't remember either way. Other times they're unreachable. And you're left holding this memory that could be profound or completely fabricated, with no way to verify which at the moment of recollection.

I think what really gives in terms of discernment is a persistence to scrutinize it.

Sitting with the situation for a relatively long period of time does eventually bring some insights.

One of them being real memories tend to have inconsistencies, rough edges, mundane details that don't serve the narrative. Dreams masquerading as memories often feel too symbolic and thematically coherent, like they're trying too hard to mean something. Real life is never perfectly timed, dreams are dreams because they have the tidiness of fiction.

I personally don't like the ambiguity of not being able to trust my own account of the past when such happens coupled with not having a way to verify with a third party in the moment.

I'm starting to think the ambiguity itself teaches something, which is certainty about the past is partly a choice we make, but I better not continue this thinking lest another rabbit hole opens up.


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