coupleofdays:

I sometimes have really frustrating dreams where, for example, I’m reading a book, and I read something interesting, turn the page… and then I can’t find the page I read previously again, no matter how much I flip through the book. Or I’m in a store with cool stuff, find something interesting, put it aside for a moment… and then I can’t find it again anywhere. Or I’ll get lost in a city, because I can’t find the street I was walking on just a few seconds ago.

What I’ve come to realize is that these dream-frustrations are probably because dream-worlds aren’t static, pre-made places, but rather just a jumbled bunch of stuff that my brain makes up as it goes along, and it’s not capable of “remembering” any previous details, aside from in the broadest possible strokes. The dream just barrels on ahead with new stuff and forgets the old.

Or, in other words, my dreams don’t have any RAM.

Oooh! Yes, I’ve noticed this too! (When I lived in Los Angeles I wrote a rather poetic thing about it.)

This frequent changing of everything in dreams, reminded me of an experiment I once read about, where people were shown words on a screen, while their eyes were tracked with a camera, and words would be changed in the moments when their eyes moved. The experience was like looking at a page of text where you kept noticing changes– but you could never see the change happening, because your eyes move much too fast to actually process anything while they move.

And that reminded me of what reading is always like for me in dreams.

Which got me speculating that maybe the rapid eye movement in dreaming sleep has something to do with it?

In other words. Maybe dreams don’t have RAM because they have REM.