Dreaming and learning/memory integration

Ev · 02-01-2012 02:08 PM

A couple nights ago I had a very interesting insight into dreaming. Last week, I created a new kind of iPhone app. It blends my facial features with an image from the web. I call it "augmented reality".

Here's an example: 45% me, the rest is average attractive male. The 2 images are blended together. I was playing with dozens of images over several hours for an entire week.

This is my first time playing with stuff like that, and I was surprised to find that on 2 consecutive days, approximately 3-5 days after the event, I had a couple very long dream like experiences of my brain playing with my app in a dream.

Because the playing with the app is a brand new and unique experience, I was able to determine that there's a certain delay between the real world action and the dream about this action. In my case, it is like this:

Started working on the app on Jan 24, Worked on it until Jan 29.
Took a couple days break.
Had long dreams about the activity on the Jan 30th, 31st

It appears that my brain was solidifying its memory of the events by re-playing the events in a dream. Because the events are very unique, it was easy to identify them as such in dreams. Furthermore, the events were learning events, in which I was exposed to a new kind of sensory input - an augmented reality image.

I wander if this kind of learning - delay - dream phenomenon may be related to having lucid dreams while visiting dreamviews or otherwise learning about lucid dreaming (reading dream journals, etc).

If there's indeed about a week delay between the episode of learning and the dream, it would be very difficult to establish the connection between the two...

Ev · 02-02-2012 04:34 AM

Tonight I had another dream which origins I can trace to specific events in the real life from about a week ago.

The dream started on my childhood town's street. There was something about sex in a Volvo station vagon, although I do not remember details. The dream continued with the car stolen, and me being involved me sorting recyclables on top of a large garbage container. Somehow I became involved in that effort, climbed on top and recycled 94% of the trash in the container. There was a purple glowing 94% on the bottom of the now nearly empty container. After that, there was a corporate fire drill outside a building that involved climbing on top of it. There was water involved, and I was competing against 2 other programmers. I asked one of them to lend me 8 hours of his programming time.

My memory of the dream is hazy, because I only typed up a few words at night to remember the sequence of the events in the dream.

While the dream is very chaotic, here's the important things:
The dream started with a station wagon Volvo and involved some sex. I think this is a reference to the metaphor about sex that involved a metaphor of man and woman in a sexual act compared to 2 cars: some tiny subcompact and a volvo. The metaphor is by Hugh Laurie, from his book "The gun seller". This is January 30th. I was reading that book before bedtime for the past 3 days.
The building in the dream was from the 25th and 26th visit to a corporate office park with several faceless identical buildings. This was done in the middle of a day
The recycling part was from the 25th trip to a recycling facility in my town.

All of these were new experiences that involved some degree of learning and understanding. Today is February 1st, one week away from the recycling event. I cannot easily identify other events in the dream as having specific origins in the waking world.

This seems to support the hypothesis that at least some types of dreams are involved in memory integration.