The Story Spark this week was something similar to a Mad Lib with no directions on what type of word to put in the blanks. We were to pick one of the phrases within the Story Spark as our writing prompt. We had 25 minutes to write.
The sentence I took was “the ________memory of her/him/them _________”
Where Do Dreams Go?
I wondered last night, where do dreams go after you have them, and why are they forgotten so quickly?
I’m sure that there is a reasonable, scientific explanation. But that is no fun looking up. Nowadays, science, as we know it, seems to be being debunked every day. So why not let my creative, unscientific brain choose its own theory? Worse comes to worst, if I’m proven wrong, and enough people read my explanation and it fits their belief system, it will be adopted. That might depend on who’s running the country then, but it’s not going to stop me from trying.
In my opinion, dreams are never forgotten. They are created by a section of your brain that has multiple functions. One aspect is the creative writing component. It’s the reason why, when given a prompt in a writing group, you can invent things, capture true memories, and embellish them with things you think might have happened, and go places where you have never gone before, meeting people you never knew.
Once it has this story, it can share some of its contents with you while you sleep. We call them dreams.
Next, when you have completed or partially completed as much as your brain wants to share, it stores that material in a part of your brain that scientists and medical professionals have yet been able to discover. Those stories are so deeply stored and locked away that you forget whatever it was you were dreaming about.
A filing system is involved, allowing more vivid memories to remain higher up in the storage area than others.
So why keep all those memories, and where is the proof that they exist? Many people in our world possess the ability to access these memories. They tend to be older individuals of all genders.
When examined by doctors, who deny the existence of this phenomenon, they diagnose these individuals as having dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
It is that area of the brain that stores these memories that unlocks and releases some of them, to the extent that individuals replace some of their short-term and long-term memories with these stories created throughout their lives.
Their minds are being overloaded with memories of things that they and they alone have experienced, but didn’t share and have forgotten.
From an outsider’s perspective, such as that of a doctor or a loved one, they may appear to be failing, losing their memories, when what may be needed is to allow them to share those unwritten memories/stories aloud to all.
Until the scientific world can discover where these hidden stories are being kept or learning how to allow those stories to either stay locked up or be released at a much slower pace, we will continue to be ignorant of the beautiful and creative minds we all have.
Maybe we need to find another storage place in our brains, maybe in our hearts, where the real memories we have, that we didn’t dream, can be stored permanently so that they can be re-released after all our dream memories have been exhausted.
At least, that was what was going on in my head as I slept last night.
