Is dream memory tricking you too?

[midix]

I am not sure how memory should work when we are dreaming but I have noticed the following for me:

- when I fall asleep and think of something and visualize it, and then let my subconscious take over, then the dream scene shows up. Then there are 2 ways:
a) I fall completely asleep. When I wake up I find out that I do not remember this short dream, but all other dreams that I saw were something completely different from the one I started to visualize; uhh my subconscious is cheating :D
b) I wake up. I remember that I saw something, but it takes at least a minute before I remember the dream scene or my own thoughts completely. Why does it take so much time to remember something that I experienced just some seconds ago?

- let's say, in a dream I see that I am talking to my aunt. I tell her "I visited you last week, I saw two kids and a dog running around your house, that was funny". In a dream I actually remember this event when I was at my aunt's and saw the kids and the dog. But when I wake up, I know 100% that those memories are not from the real life because my aunt does not have little children and I did not visit her a week ago. Still I have those dream memories in my head.
The question now is - did I saw a dream last week that I visited my aunt (I could answer this if I had a dream diary and only if I could remember this particular dream in the morning)?
Or did I have a dream tonight about visiting my aunt the first time and then my dream time put me a week further and I had a second dream about visiting my aunt?
Or the third way - I did not have a dream about visiting my aunt the first time, and those memories were somehow created tonight at the moment when I saw my aunt?

It happens so many times that in a dream I remember some events but when I wake up I know those events are not real and I do not know when those memories came. Sometimes in a dream I am some other person and have some other memories :D

What do you think about it?

[CFTraveler]

I think I answered the question in another thread, but I can't remember which one it was.
Or, I should say, I answered with what I think is happening. It has to do with the frequency of the dreaming mind vs. the frequency of the awake mind.

[Korpo]

Hello, midix.

Kurt Leland has an interesting adventure to recount in his book "Otherwhere" - there he describes how he visits zones that dreamers and discarnates can visit that serve the purpose of showing realities which could have been if other events were chosen in the past.

Imagine you had a visit to one of these zones, and your aunt's life would have run differently, one or several key decisions having turned out different. You would have then for example experienced her having kids and dogs, and then would have recalled it in this dream.

Similarly, you could also subconsciously know that maybe another lifestyle might suit your aunt better, and in the dream you express it by tapping into such a zone and describing what you see, but you recall it like a memory.

If something similar like this would have happened, a certain confusion is not surprising. The human brain is not exactly accustomed to things like storing two experiences at once or having two different, vivid memories of the past. You can experience reality at the same time from several levels of your being / energy bodies, and when waking up your brain will have trouble putting the events into sequence, because at that time that's the only kind of sequence of events - linearity - your brain is used to.

One particular aspect of dream memory and out-of-body recall described in theosophic literature is the aspect of downloading the information energy body by energy body. For example, an astral level dream get passed through the etheric body and then into the brain. This mechanism needs to be developed in order to be reliable and undistorted, and to lose as little memory of the dream as possible. Hence the irregularities in recall.

I've been astounded by how much information can be lost when recalling dreams and experiences, and how much distortion can happen. This becomes especially apparent when I try to interpret symbolism and I find a deeper one that has been obfuscated by a fearful reaction on a more superficial level. In these cases I am lucky - I still can decode some of the structure of the dream and see how my reactions shifted some of the symbols to the negative, for example. But dream recally can be tricky like that - many "layers" of yourself involved.

Be well,
Oliver

[midix]

I guess, I'll finally start recording my dreams. Sometimes I wake up after a dream and think "wow, someone said some unknown word or idea in the dream, I should find more info in the Internet tomorrow" but when I get up in the morning I only know that there was something I wanted to remember but I have lost it.

And I started reading viewtopic.php?f=19&t=8951 (http://forums.astraldynamics.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=8951) - there are some great ideas how to train my dream memory, thanks to Rain, iF for some new ideas about VILD.