Returning to Nesslabs for further inspiration, we have the question: What’s the link between dreams and memories?

It is said that every last person we happen to see in our dreams is someone we have encountered, at least once, in the real world. Our brains cannot create a person, so therefore our dreams are linked to memories, I don’t believe there’s a question of that. What I do have to wonder is how deep that connection goes.

In my personal case, my dreams rarely, if ever, follow the trend of the day. I can have a typical day at work, followed by a typical evening, and then dream about being back at school, or that I’m being chased by creepy clowns through an abandoned warehouse, or that I’m on a plane in mid-air that suffers a flood (yes, this dream happened). The school dreams tie into memories, albeit they don’t reflect recent memories or activities. The stuff about the creepy clowns (and I can add to that, with dreams about alien encounters, epic space battles, being hunted by Terminators, and more) is not rooted in any direct experience, and is more to do with my subconscious trying to filter stuff.

What some of these weird and wonderful dreams do reflect is material I’ve watched or read. In watching a movie or reading a book, that material sort of becomes a memory. It then entangles itself around real-world experience, and other fantastical elements, though even then it doesn’t always make sense. The dream I had about the flood on the plane is a key example. To this day, I do not know what brought that dream about. I have nothing to tie it to in terms of memories. Conversely, I have had quite a few dreams that directly relate to memories. How about the dream where I get up and get ready for work, only to then wake up and do it all over again? I have also had the ‘turn up to work naked dream’, which I can confidently state has never happened…

What about you, dear ‘kats? What do you think about the link between memories and dreams?