Why do I only remember some of my dreams?
After watching several Ted Talks, I think I understand what is happening in the dream world. The first Ted Talk is by Russell Foster, on
"Why do we sleep?" The second Ted Talk is by Dan Gilbert, on "The surprising science of happiness".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWULB9Aoopc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU
The brains primary job is to find solutions to problems. Actually, that is our entire biological make up, but our brain evolved in humans to provide even great capacity to tackle larger and larger problems. One of the things that it needs, obviously is sleep. And the reason why we sleep is discussed in Russell Foster's Ted Talk. We sleep to regenerate, to allow our short term memories to be processed into long term memories.
With the short answer as to why we sleep set aside, let's look at where dreams come from. The actual substance that makes up dreams. Dreams use the remnants of our memories (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) to build new worlds. But these remnants are not concrete or whole as we experience in the real world, they are broken bits and pieces, like looking into a broken mirror, you're seeing a lot of material from a lot of different angles all mashed together.
To add further intrigue to the broken mirror effect, the mirror is constantly moving, since our brain is used to the constant stream of data from our five senses. So, things in our dreams morph. A cat becomes a human, playing outside in the snow morphs into playing out side on a sunny warm summers day, being an adult morphs into being a child, and so on.
There is a misunderstanding though about our brains, though. We use the term conscious and subconscious to describe being awake and asleep. We also use subconscious to describe the autonomic nervous system. Technically, we never loose consciousness, we are always conscious, what happens is that the brain switches between external stimuli and internal stimuli. The reason why it can do this is because lies in the second Ted Talk.
Dan Gilbert, describes a study about synthetic happiness. What's interesting about this study is the description he uses to describe how our brain perceives the future through an "Experience Simulator". This simulator is running all the time. It never shuts down, and it draws on our memory remnants to determine the successful outcome of making it through a maze.
The experience simulator is where our dreams come from.
So, why do we only remember so much of our dreams? Here is a test. Think about a huge task. How much of the task can you visualize completing until you've actually completed all of it? Now another test, take a deck of cards, lay them out in 8 columns all face up. Now, following the rules of freecell, without moving a single card, move all the cards, Ace through King back into 4 stacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCell
If you want a true test of IQ, this is one of the best. By using only your memory and imagination, or experience generator, you are working on a maze. How far through the maze you get, depends on how focused you can remain. How fast you can recognize the patterns in the game. And how many steps you can make before you've lost your position in the game. Each game contains roughly 104 card moves.
Now, every time you're distracted, something in your brain has triggered your experience generator to look at something new. This is why your dreams morph. And, the experience generator only has a certain amount of memory to store a simulated environment. Those memories that it generates have to be offloaded to your short term memory, which by the way are offline because .... you're sleeping. However, depending on how conscious you are, your experience generator during a sleep state, can transfer some of the dreams information into your short term memory either due to the chemicals not being present there, or because it has cleared that area of memory out and is able to store that material there.
This is why you only remember a small amount of your dreams, yet still remember or feel like you remember that you have dreamed for a long time. It also explains why people have deja vu. The experience simulator is constantly churning out millions of simulated experiences, and re-experiencing what it created as the material is moved from the experience generator to short term memory to long term memory.
