Thread: Memory: the Forgotten Fundamental

Post sent and missed the posts in the meantime - going to read back a bit later, soz!

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

This is a very interesting theory, and I should watch the video before I comment but I don't have the time now.

It is hard for me to believe that we create more and more stability in our dream world as we visit it, because the opposite has happened to me. When I was a kid, I had a lot of those experiences, almost every night, where I would go to places that were mine and I would recognize them. But now it never happens anymore. I am always in new places, and I do miss my childhood dreams where I had a relatively stable world. For example, when I was a kid, I had the whole village where I lived mapped out but only my own house was accurate, the rest was an invention of mine, but I always liked to explore beyond my house and recognize the other times I had went there (in dreams). There was a path in the forest that was always the same. I had a "house" that was my own. You had to cross a river infested with beavers to get there. My second house had a third floor with a ghost in it. And the basement also had ghosts. These extra places in my house didn't exist in waking life. The garden outside my house was always the same in my dreams, but not the same as in real life. There was a very awesome giant snow slide park that I liked going to in my dreams. And the list goes on. I have lost all of these stable places with age.

So, it doesn't seem intuitive to me that dream-to-dream memory stabilizes our personal dreamscape. But maybe I am misinterpreting something.

Well - it seems you had exactly the same state of affairs I talk about in your childhood, prior dreams melting together with following ones and a landscape to re-visit with features staying (quasi) stable. You do not have it anymore, but you did have it, so I don't think it contradicts my experiences.

I believe I am a bit hung up psychologically with that time and location in my life, that's probably why I built a whole "world" to dream about this. Maybe if I resolve what was going on back then and how it impacts my thinking today, I will also cease dreaming of it.

I do have many completely different and new dreams as well, but also really many of these recurring-theme ones.
So I would say it is something which can happen, but maybe is not typical, since I don't usually read about it, but I would count young you as an example.

Originally Posted by Sageous

[Sorry about all the separate posts, guys & mods; I hadn't planned it that way!]

I can only shake my head about that you feel you shouldn't respond in detail and to certain aspects of posts so that it is clear what you are referring to.
It is absurd that it would be horribly impolite to "rip posts apart" when we are taking care and time to specifically answer to the different points people make in posts, as has been claimed.

I absolutely like it when my posts, or certain parts of my posts, are valued and/or taken seriously so much as to be taken on step by step!
If I don't want somebody to react to what exactly I write, then maybe I shouldn't write it in the first place.
I fail to see how it is impolite and I don't believe it is abhorred by members either.

Please do go on doing that - I experience it as somebody taking my thoughts seriously and taking care with answering!

No problem if I don't get read or answered to of course - I don't expect anything from anybody, might suddenly disappear myself.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Not so much hard facts and context, Steph, as remembering the simple fact of your current waking-life condition (being asleep in bed), with that action of remembering being far more important than the thing you are remembering. The important part about remembering your sleeping body is that you are not retrieving a specific memory (we really don't store a memory of being asleep in bed), but nudging your memory with a reminder of waking-life reality. This reality will both help pull your memory into your dreaming self and act as a reminder that the body you are currently occupying is not real.

I really believe we are all on the same page here, and what is the difficulty is actually also still a difficulty for neuroscience - what exactly is memory, how come there are several aspects to it. It really isn't possible to think without any memory. Would be good to read up on it a bit, got to agree with Zoth there.

Well said!

Thank you!

A difficult side-effect of WILD is that you assume, especially intellectually, that you have entered a dream with your entire waking-life Self intact. I do not believe this is true: your regular functions of sleep are robbing you of bits of Self every moment of the way, the biggest bit being memory.

So yes, you are confident of your circumstances, and well aware that you are dreaming, but this awareness is being done without memory, almost a case where you are simply telling yourself this is a dream without innate confirmation. So those preconceptions and their requisite limits can indeed be present. That you were able to occasionally trump them probably indicates those rare events when, like I mentioned above, your entire Self is indeed present in the dream.

Again I think, we are aiming to find the aspect of memory which facilitates the Self to be aware of itself, metacognition. Maybe it is not even a special kind of memory, it is more about which brain-centres access memory. And when the regions involved with metacognition retrieve memory, then it is this sort of memory.

Ah - but what is the Self in any way? We are getting into deep scientific and philosophical waters here, have been in them for a while.
Maybe and probably it is necessary to have memory for a Self to be apparent. This assumption fits with reports of deep meditation where there is neither memory nor "Self". I believe all thinking entails memory, and when they both come to a halt in deep meditation, people report dissolution of Self. But despite this, "they" are still conscious, so consciousness actually doesn't require memory, but Self does..?

As you know I had my first WILD yesterday and had been planning to ask myself the hard data and episodic memory from recent real life.
And so I did, I thought of this thread and remembered where I was for real, in this same looking bed, which funnily I took with me into the LD and space, that it was February 2015 and why I had been so tired and lay down for an afternoon nap.

But - I was not my clear waking life self, impairment like chemically induced, not a bad comparison, see below. Swimmy thoughts, and an elation which was not only due to the scenery but inherent in the state, it felt. Anyway - test fully satisfactory, did not wake up and went on to have an epic LD: First ever WILD - Hukif's Galaxy Collision Dare - Oh My - What a Ride!!

Originally Posted by TheUncanny

This makes sense. Perhaps the transition from wakefulness to dreaming is comparable to the transition from sobriety to drunkenness; a gradual decline in mental faculties that can leave one with an false impression of how cognizant they actually (fun fact: I'm drunk right now ).

Yes, a very good comparison, which had also come to my mind lately!

That being said, part of me still wonders where these waking preconceptions exist in the mind. The higher-level functions that we are discussing, such as logic and working memory, are all executive functions of the prefrontal cortex. But, I suspect that these preconceptions may exist in a lower and less accessible part of the brain. For example, when in a lucid dream, do you have to actively reason that matter is solid in order to walk on the ground or open doors? Of course not, that is being enforced by something "outside" of those executive functions. I think this is why logic/reason is sometimes not enough to have complete control over a dream.

I agree that these preconceptions seem to underlie all our actions, incl. conscious thought. We have a model of the world and one of ourselves, and both are apparent in normal dreams, but often impaired. The world in my case is less impaired than the Self, sometimes people fly with a sofa and I explain it away, but usually not.

It is still not even clear how intelligence comes to pass, that's why we are not in the singularity, if you will, having built "proper" AIs. And I also believe it is on a much smaller and more generalized level than usually talked about where memory is at work. We read that the hippocampus does this and that, but there is more basic entwinement, I think. Been reading some articles around this thematic lately, need to search for what was explicitly about how memory's workings and also location are only known in rough terms and how thinking and memory depend on each other.

But what I have found on a quick look is something maybe not entirely fitting, but I feel like linking through, maybe somebody has thoughts on it - how intelligent behaviour might come to pass: Practopoiesis

But this is just me speculating out loud. I'm going to make it a point to access my waking memory at the beginning of every WILD and see what effect is has, not only on my dream control, but also on dream recall. I think it may help in that area as well.

I did have control in the above dream, but not really, I was more on a ride, getting to what I wanted, accomplishing a lucid dare, but not easily and not directly. Doing the memory-check didn't impair me notably, though. At least I'm not sure. Thing is I enjoyed it all, even if it wasn't what the Steph had ordered consciously. Is it maybe also dream control to give oneself a marvellous show?

Sorry I can't stop writing about it, but I will one day have done enough of it, promise...