Much to the dismay of my hypothalmus, I have not been getting nearly enough sleep lately.

As an unexpected side effect of this change, I seem to have taught myself how to quickly drift into a state of unconsciousness. On most nights I am able to see and hear the beginnings of a dream within ten minutes of lying down.

For the first time that I can remember, the onset of this transitioning-into-sleep state appears both frequently and predictably. It is in fact so predictable that I retain significant memory of the experience rather than a complete lack thereof.

Unfortunately it seems that the closer I get to the dreamstate, the less active my long-term memory becomes. It very much feels as though my brain's ability to autonomously create and simulate artificial realities is mutually exclusive with its ability to make use of long-term memory.

Several years ago I tried to learn how to lucid dream, and in retrospect this limitation explains my lack of success: I could not figure out how to simultaneously be in a dream and also maintain awareness of my intent to control it.

However, I think a more concerning facet presents itself regarding this peculiar behavior of long-term memory. While it's obvious to my waking self that my dream self lacks this mental faculty, it certainly doesn't feel that way in the moment. In the times when I remember my dreams well enough to think back through them, they consistently lack any form of large-scale consistency or structure. Discontinuous settings morph seamlessly into one other in ways that seem impossible to my waking self, and yet in the moment I remain utterly oblivious.

Why, then, is my dream memory so inconsistent? I think the answer is very simple - that my brain makes it up.

A dream is by definition already an artificial reality with no concrete ties to the real world, one that does not exist anywhere besides the confines of our minds. It is only a small step further to accept that our brains too can supplant within us arbitrary memories, even ones which the self have never actually lived through. The reason why impossible changes in dream scenery go unnoticed by the dream self may then be because our very memory of the old scenery goes through impossible changes of its own.

However, if we accept that memory can be so easily made up, we open a pretty substantial pandora's box of an issue: Generally, we treat our memories as kind of timeline or journal of events we've lived through. Although it is clearly not perfect, it is often good enough to be used as a "ground truth" upon which everything else builds.

But if this timeline can at any point in time be edited by forces that both reside within us but are siumltaneously also outside of our control, how can we be sure of anything? Does feeling real make reality real, or are we just a dream within a dream?

tags: life