Thread: Total Recall

I'm not sure if I am the only one who deals with this but every so often I will experience an immediate brief but vivid recollection of a dream I once had a long time ago.

For example: I will on occasion have a peculiar dream involving any number of images or sensations linked to unique situations. Yet I will entirely forget about this dream the moment I wake up and it will stay forgotten for months or even years until one day, for no reason I can fathom, something will trigger these images back into my memory.

Does anybody have any idea what causes this sort of dream recall or how memories of dreams can lay dormant for such long periods of time?

Is there some deeper element of the psyche that gives these dream recalls a kind of meaning or purpose or is it all just random stuff?

i read that dreams are your brain sorting through all that was taken in through the day and ordering and discarding as it goes along. Maybe something happened that reminded your brain of the dream that was caused by something you may have been thinking about or seen during the day. another form of deja vu i guess

Well, I can't say for sure what caused that. One thing to keep in mind is that memory is a tricky thing. It's very possible to remember things that never happened to you, and it's always worth keeping that possibility in mind. Also, it's not uncommon for old memories to be suddenly revived. Although the idea of "repressed memories" is now pretty much discarded, it is the case that people occasionally suddenly remember childhood sexual abuse that they simply had forgotten about (in those cases, they usually didn't recognize it as abuse at the time & weren't particularly upset about it at the time. It just seemed unimportant and they forgot about it).

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I get the same thing, do you also get that strong feeling of deja vu along with it.