And my pillow was gone

[prog]

It occurs to me that, at least for me, the cinematic - or even literary - depiction of dreams is as consistently technically incorrect as the depiction of computers. Does anyone really have dreams that are picture-perfect flashbacks of things that happened earlier to them in waking life? Or that are even recognizably flashbacks at all?

I'm a little more willing to believe stories about recurring dreams, but I don't think they're really all that common. When I hear someone on the screen saying "I still see her face in my dreams every night" I'm like "No you don't, you liar. Last night you dreamt of a penguin wearing a bikini that was trying to give you a green lollipop but you wanted a purple one and suddenly you were making out with it, and maybe in retrospect you figure that the penguin was supposed to be her, but it's rather an oversimplification to abstract the whole deal as 'her face'. But, whatever."

Comments

on "recurring" dreams

[wrog]

I've certainly had a number of dreams where I was certain during the dream and after waking up that I'd had the dream before.

But since I never actually get around to writing down my dreams, I don't know whether that's actually the case, i.e., whether it's a memory of an actual previous dream or simply a dream-memory of a dream that's getting fixed in my awake memory as having been a previous dream.

Though it could well be true given that I (as with most people) have forgotten most of my dreams.

On the other hand, it seems likely to me that dreams are just mental garbage-collection, so it's not at all surprising that the pointers encountered (i.e., to previous dreams and whatnot) might be inherently unreliable.