Have you ever thought the thought that if we can believe a fake dream memory (that is, for instance, if your memory inside the dream, so to speak, tells you that you’ve always been an engineer, while in fact, you are still a univerity student) to be true, what if this would happen in real life? What if your brain went nuts and you started to believe things that never happened happened. This phenomenon might be close to schizofrenia but it’s more like fake memories rather than split personalities.
This distinction between real memories and fake memories seems to be unclear among young children. I myself, have some memories from early childhood that I’m not sure whether they actually happened or if they were dreams. It feels as if they really happened, but somehow they have a kind of dreamlike quality to them. I also have some memories that feel real but I’m pretty sure they were dreams because the setting was a little bit off.
So, what happens to people who enter this blurry zone where they no longer can distinguish true memories from false? Is there a name for this?
Are you linking split personalities with schizophrenia? These are two different abnormalities of the mind. Schizophrenia is a very broad term applied to many a mental disease…too much to go into here, but is primarily a dissociation with what we consider reality and the patient has great difficulty organizing or controling their thoughts. Studies show that schizophrenia is predominant in large built up cities and the incidence drops as you move out of the city. (If the schizophrenics migrate to the city or the city contributes to their schizophrenia is still debateable!.. I would probably opt for the later!) People who have split personalities have what is called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)… and is just what it sounds like. Its a fascinating disorder as it raises many questions against the reductionlistic view of the mind/brain dilemma.
There is a label for it… False Memory Syndrome. Again, its some damn interesting stuff.
What happens to people who suffer from this? It leads into questions of repressed memories etc… Do you think the brain can really repress memories? Or how accurate is memory would be a better question. In my experience memory can be very creative and subjective. I some times wonder if we actually have dream plots when we dream… or as we are recalling bits and pieces of dreams do we kind of ‘activley’ fill in the gaps so we can have a comprehendable picture, so that life makes sense again?
When I recall a dream after I wake up I normally type out my dream on my computer in a way that only makes sense to me. If you were to read it back for you it would make no sense. Later when I convert my dreams into short stories I add extra details to get some contunity in the stories I produce, If you like I can post one of my stories on the net ?
Sometimes I’m wondering if something happend IRL or just in a dream. That’s with things that happened a few years ago. But sometimes about things that happend a few weeks ago. Mostly it are little things. And sometimes I ask to someone if it really happend or didn’t.
I like to make short movies. (like 5 mins.) I have made a few movies already. We want to make a movie with a girl. She dreamed that her band said she wasn’t good enough anymore and said she have to leave her band. That was on a really stupid way. Not nice. But she didn’t know it was a dream, she thought it was real so she didn’t was angry at her band. And she didn’t came to the repitie etc.
We have try to film it, but it didn’t really work. With that movie we were with people who weren’t serious enough. We had a good time, but we had filmed so many crap. And we didn’t make a movie of it. The script was also very bad, cause we changed the hole script a day before we were gonna film, and it was ful of faults.
Please post one of your stories samzen05…I do the same thing but I can’t keep my stories short so they end up bits and pieces of novels…And Carnun’s right but I do believe in repressed memories and I’ve dealt with alot of addicts who have them and when they become sober the stuff just comes out of nowhere PTSD like…It was there all along and they knew it but their ego or conciousness didn’t want to accept it and suddenly it’s right there in their face…Very traumatizing all over again… hard to watch it happen too
Back when I used to write short stories, I always found that using a dream to build the story off of worked quite well. I’m much more imaginative, visual, and creative in the dream world than in the waking world. Why not use that creativity?
going back to the subject, I once had a dream where a friend’s brother IRL was my brother in the dream, and I tryed to protect him from a man who wanted to capture him, and when the dream ended I was wondering why I didn’t saw my brother (my friend’s bro IRL) in my house, and got to the conclusion that maybe my fathers didn’t love him so much, all this though lasted 3 seconds or less.
I experience false memory both in dreams and real life. In dreams I think it’s mostly because my mind just makes it up, but in real life, it’s that False Memory Syndrom that Carnun mentioned. Memory isn’t perfect after all.
I learned a long time ago (at least I think I learned) that even vivid memories we have can be quite distorted. Our memories of events change over time, so that what we think is a perfect recollection becomes quite distorted.
Very interesting. So we can’t really trust our memory completely after all. Now that you mention it, sometimes I think, for instance “I ate pizza then watched TV that night”, but afterwords I come to the conclusion that no, I ate the pizza another night, it was pasta that I ate that night. (even though I can’t eat either of them )
Oh, that happens to me now and then - I think something’s happened in real life and it turns out to be a dream. It goes the other way too - just a few days ago I thought I remembered an old dream of something and then belatedly realised it had really happened (albeit many years ago).
I think it’s because I do recall most of my dreams in a lot of detail. The scenes are 100% exactly like memories and I usually rely on my common sense to tell them apart. But my older memories are not very reliable, and so I sometimes get them mixed up. Of course, most of my dreams are filled with things that are completely impossible in reality, but occasionally I have one that’s close enough to real life to be difficult to tell the difference.
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