Ever since I remembered one of my teacher’s tangent lectures I’ve been thinking about a theory that he told us about. I can’t remember the theorist’s name, but his theory was that you have many, many layers in your subconscious mind. Slowly, memories drift through the layers and it becomes harder, and harder to remember them, until it becomes essentially impossible. Only certain life changing events can be remembered readily after it sinks far enough through the layers. Now that I think about it, I think the man’s name started with a J, it was definitely some European language like German because the name was pronounced differently than it would be in English.
Regardless, once I heard about LD, and I remembered that lecture, I began thinking, since your dreams are essentially an extension or a manifestation of your subconscious mind, could it be possible to access memories long gone? If you could, then in your dreams you could search for happy memories, or, more likely you would search for memories of movies, and project them onto a dream tv in your LD. Also, you could access long forgotten dreams that you never knew existed, and access that one perfect house in a past dream (that has been a particularly big problem for me, since I have had well over 10 different dream houses, some of them were all the same except for a few slight variations), maybe you could combine the best of all of your houses into one, and then maybe if you have one really different and cool house that would never fit into the rest, you could create a summer house. Maybe you could watch your entire life throughout a series of dreams! The possibilities would be limitless!
Regardless, it would be awesome to be able to access old memories that are otherwise inaccessible through lucid dreaming. I’ve never thought about. Perhaps I should add it to my list of lucid dream goals.
If you ever achieve that goal, please tell me. I could make a lot of money teaching people to do this if someone could prove my theory But then again if I prove it…
This is actually quite a common theorey! A lot of people use lucid dreams to uncover surpressed memories, or even (as our current moon’s dream goal is,) to see past lives. Just one of the many benefits of lucid dreaming!
I agree, it would be awesome. Once thought about that, too. However, I am quite sure that it is not possible to access all of your old memories. I recently watched a TV show I’ve seen 4-5 years ago and I am sure I didn’t miss a single episode but still I had a strong feeling that I never saw some of the eps so I must have forgotten them somehow. And since such a strong ‘trigger’ is not able to bring all the memories back, no LD nor hypnotic state may bring every memory back. I guess they are either lost in the brain and the brain does not know where they belong (if the data structure on your HD is damaged, you may have the same problem) or maybe they are ‘deleted’.
But maybe mankind will invent a machine that can read the complex memory system in our brain and recreate the memories so they are avaible just like the memories of any recent event. Or maybe it will be possible to archieve current memories into files so they might be kept as a kind of diary?