Are my dreams old or am I crazy?

June 24, 2007 11:10 PM

DreamFilter: I sometimes 'remember' dreams for the first time when awake, but seem to think that they occurred weeks ago. Did they? Am I nuts?

Ordinarily, I'll remember dreams the next day. (Or, as researches have shown, I probably won't remember many of them.)

What troubles me, though, is that sometimes I'll remember a dream, for the first time, and believe that it occurred weeks ago. (These aren't anything like repressed nightmares... They're mostly very dull, in fact: for example, in one such dream, I was mopping the downstairs of a Burger King in a big city.)

At the risk of sounding crazier, I sometimes have a sort of deja vu feeling about the dreams: in the Burger King one, I think the dream was somewhere between several months and a year ago, and the deja vu refers to the fact that I feel like, at some point in the past, I've remembered that dream and thought that it occurred in the past then. But I'm really not confident that I actually did.

While I'm pretty certain that you can't tell me whether I actually had this dream last night or if it really was weeks ago, there are a few more answerable questions I have about it. Does this happen to anyone else, or have I gone completely off the deep end? If it's happened to others, does this phenomenon have a name? And is there any research into whether the dreams are actually old or not?

posted by fogster to grab bag (15 comments total)

You might never have had these dreams at all; your memory might be constructing them from whole cloth.

Brains are weird.
posted by flabdablet at 11:34 PM on June 24, 2007

This kind of thing happens to me too. More rarely, I'll dream something realistic enough that I won't immediately realize that my memory is of a dream instead of a real experince (until I realize, "hey, I never worked at Burger King and I've never been to New York!"). As you say, it mostly happens with extremely mundane dreams.

But I also think that in many dreams I will dream of remembering something that happened months before (in the dream's continuity), and that false sense of time can also carry over to when I'm awake and remembering the dream.

And I suspect that I have some recurring dreams that I rarely, if ever, remember, but when I do remember them, I still get a sense of their recurring-ness. But I might simply be dreaming the whole sense of recurrence, and only having the dream once.

Summary: I think I have the same sorts of dreams. I also think they're pretty common; when I've mentioned dreams like these to other people, they haven't generally thought they were unusual. Dreams seem t be able to mess with my sense of time in the same way they can mess with my sense of place or identity ("and then, somehow, I was in Paris and I was a professional accordion player...")
posted by hattifattener at 11:34 PM on June 24, 2007

I'll often remember a dream right after I wake up, or like you said, a few weeks after (though not more than a month for me). Dunno why, but sometimes whatever I'm currently doing will spark me to remember a dream from a while ago.
Kinda weird because I'll go from not remembering anything, to remembering it quite vividly within a few seconds.
posted by jammnrose at 11:35 PM on June 24, 2007

I'm not sure if you're remembering the dreams as actually happening, or if you're remembering having the dreams three weeks ago.

An example from my own crazy life. Recently my mother wanted to get some pictures from her new digital camera into her computer. "You'll need a card reader," said I. Mother and father don't know what a card reader is, so I say I'll buy them one via eBay and have it sent to their house. A week later my mother asks me how I'm getting on with ordering a card reader. I tell her that I thought my father had said he'd bought one. She then points out that he has no idea what a card reader is, what it looks like, how to use it etc. That's when I realised that one of my dreams had sneaked into my memory as a real situation (probably a dream I'd had the very same night after discussing the card reader). But until that the point of talking to my mother about it, having not thought about it too much, I genuinely believed that my dad had ordered a card reader.

Does this help?
posted by humblepigeon at 11:46 PM on June 24, 2007

I know exactly what you mean, about the deja vu. For me it get's worse. I get deja vu when feeling deja vu about remembering a past dream/experience. When it starts getting that recursive, I just have to stop.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:54 PM on June 24, 2007

Happens to me too. I dream it, and think that I dreamt it a week ago. I'm not even certain that I didn't dream it a week ago.

5 minutes later, I can't remember any of it anyway so it's nothing to lose sleep over ;-)
posted by kisch mokusch at 12:59 AM on June 25, 2007

This happens to me, too, but usually I think that I had the exact same dream weeks ago.
posted by rhapsodie at 1:12 AM on June 25, 2007

Previously
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:51 AM on June 25, 2007

I get this very frequently. My brain must have GBs of dreams stored somewhere. The problem is all the scenes are cut up in a vast pot of dream soup.
I'll remember a dream from years ago sometimes, just because some thought process that I'm having at the time triggers off the memory.
My theory is that most of the time we don't have access to this portion of our internal hard drive unless some brain event, such as a particular thought-process related to a previous dream) grants access to it. I have nothing to base my theory on whatsoever apart from my own personal experience.
posted by razzman at 5:21 AM on June 25, 2007

Yes, I get this all the time and other people I know sometimes get it too. I think it's pretty common.

There are even times where I told people about very odd dreams right after I had them that then in fact did come true exactly as I had dreamed.
posted by milarepa at 6:24 AM on June 25, 2007

I don’t remember many dreams (tho those I do recall seem to have the same quality), but I’ve become very conscious of my hypnogogic experiences when drifting off, and they almost invariably include the sensation that I’m returning to, or repeating, or reconfirming whatever weird situation or mental construct they are representing. And what’s weird about these situations is mostly how ordinary, convincing, yet on emerging from them into consciousness, how completely fabricated and nonsensical they actually are. It’s as if my mind adds this sensation of returning to, or recognition of, whatever is the hypnogogic content, as a way of keeping me from detecting its strangeness, which, when it happens, of course, always wakes me up.
posted by dpcoffin at 8:35 AM on June 25, 2007

I have had similar experiences. Generally memories do not form very well during dreaming - this is why it is so important for people who want to remember their dreams to write them down immediately upon waking - to reinforce the memory before it vanishes. So I think it's very unlikely that you are remembering old dreams you previously did not remember. I think you're just having some kind of neurological hiccup similar to déjà vu, where either due to some parallel to a not-consciously remembered memory pathway, or some purely neurological phenomenon (déjà vu isn't really understood scientifically, although there are some theories) is reading to your brain as an "old" memory. Lots of weird things happen to the brain when you're waking up. Be glad that you don't wake up paralyzed feeling like a demon is sitting on your chest.

I get déjà vu a lot, who knows why. I've learned that taking it seriously or worrying about it is pointless, it doesn't mean anything. I find it best to immediately and consciously discount it: the sensation fades quickly and it is of no significance in greater life.
posted by nanojath at 9:42 AM on June 25, 2007

To answer my own question, just in case it helps anyone else, the Wikipedia page on déjà vu has some interesting information; among others, anxiety (me!) and schizophrenia apparently have ties to increased feelings of déjà vu. (Other medical and psychological conditions are also connected.)

Thanks everyone, for the helpful answers!
posted by fogster at 11:11 AM on June 25, 2007

I get these too, all the time. I think a clearer description would be precognitive dream. My pet theory is that our subconscious is very good at combining recent experiences into speculative fiction, and of the millions of dreams you cycle through in your life, at least a few are bound to hit near the mark. Understandably, such an experience is jarring, so it tends to stand out, but it is statistically insignificant. I would go further and assert that our subconscious is in fact hard-wired to search for and predict future patterns based on current events. Otherwise, how could we even drive a car while having a conversation? Your mental valet (to use a phrase from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink) is there to take care of all the mundane details for you. And recent research indicates that one reason we become fatigued and crave sleep is that without it, our brains' predictive description of the world begins to desynchronize. Sleep and dreaming are the equivalent of weather prediction software resetting itself with a new set of environmental observations. In my speculative opinion, of course :-).
posted by Araucaria at 12:17 PM on June 25, 2007

"Statistically insignificant": that said, when I do experience such an event, I tend to trust my gut and look for reasons why that particular subconscious thought would happen to bubble up in the particular circumstance. Was I trying to give myself a warning of potential danger, or is there some emotional conflict I've been avoiding that I need to work through?
posted by Araucaria at 12:21 PM on June 25, 2007