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I have this same experience with dreams at least a few times a month. For example I'll have a dream where I'm recounting a real-life story to a friend or family member. Later on, during my waking life, I'll tell the story again to someone and I won't be able to tell if I've told the story to them before or not, regardless if they are the person from the dream. Sometimes, I won't even remember the dream and I have the same feeling. I usually catch myself while telling them whatever I am sharing, and ask "Have I told you this before? No? Ok...". It's supremely weird, and I've just learned to either ignore it or catch myself.

Also, with the same frequency, can't distinguish if something (realistic) actually has happened to me or if it was in a dream. Something as simple, for example, as going to the beach and playing volleyball with my friends. I will catch myself going through a memory of something, only to realize it actually was from a dream. The memory is as real as any others I have - vivid detail, feelings attached to it, etc. I have to think back on what I've done that week to see if it actually happened or not.

Observing the inner workings of memory and the brain as symptoms is one of the oddest things in life, in my opinion. I've learned not to be scared of it and instead enjoy it as part of the human experience!

Strangely, these are the only types of dreams I can ever recollect. On the occasions that I do remember my dreams after waking up, it's often because they are related to a very specific thought I had before falling asleep (especially during short naps) and I immediately think of that after waking up. In these situations, it becomes very difficult to discern what has and hasn't happened, and I often need to think for a few minutes or check my texts in order to solve the mystery. Other times, it just comes down to a goal coming to mind that I feel like I have accomplished already, even though it only occurred in a dream. It's almost as if my thoughts from the dream remain in my subconscious, and despite being able to tell what was and was not real in these situations, I have a lingering feeling of some sort of experience related to the specific goals that I use to "dig up" the dream from my memories.

you've just described exactly the same experience which happens to me quite often. I must say that I'm quite relieved that I'm not the only one like that. thank you for taking time to write this

Absolutely! I'm trying to share more with friends and other mediums about the odd things I experience in my life. I'm coming to the realization that these are just glimpses into how the brain works that we interpret in odd ways with our higher level thought - not things that separate me and my own experience from the experiences of others. It's important to open a dialog about these things and not cycle deep in your own conscious thoughts about it all :)

There's a hypothesis that this is why we (normally) forget our dreams; it prevents us from getting confused about what's real.

My hypothesis is that dreams don't actually happen as we sleep, just that the conscious state "arrives" in the brain before the cleaning/storing processes have completed. The brain then creates a memory to explain what's hanging around from the clean-up. So the dream happens during waking, the brain inventing new parts as we try and recall the dream so that the dream state can be established from a logical timeline.

Analogy: a magical secretary is tidying your desk and files. They pull out some files to re-order, put some files you were working on away, lift it pages/images to see where those files should go, etc.. You interrupt them and they scuttle away. You don't believe in magical secretaries so you quickly (and inconsistently) imagine that you were working on the files that were out making a story that explains how those files came to be there, in that arrangement.

Presumably if scanning techniques can show images of what we see in dreams that provides some evidence against this hypothesis, however it doesn't defeat it unless it shows we _experience_ those images through the period when we suppose we're dreaming.

Evidence that refutes this idea gladly considered.

If you've ever experienced lucid dreaming, I believe your hypothesis can be considered refuted _while_ you are in a lucid dream (for the same reason that the phrase "I think therefore I am" carries any weight). After the fact though, it doesn't seem possible to distinguish between a real memory of a lucid dream and your idea of a created memory of a lucid dream.

Another possible argument against is if a partner next to you observes you tossing and turning and possibly speaking in your sleep over time, and then you wake up and describe a dream you were experiencing consistent with what they saw. How would you explain the tossing and turning and talking in one's sleep in your hypothesis?

I considered lucid dreaming, indeed that was the spur that drove me to this hypothesis - your suggested counter argument was my thought there, one can't tell if one constructed a dream with a lucid characteristic after waking rather than actually having a lucid dream experience extending through the time you were asleep.

See however the sibling comment.

People have been able to communicate to the outside when lucid dreaming (via eye movement mostly), during controlled experiments.

So at the very least lucid dreams happen in 'real time'.

I've not heard of this phenomenon, communicating with a person in a dream state: could you cite it?

People saying things could be like the images appearing in the visual cortex that I tried to address in brief. They can appear, be processed, provide external output and such without necessarily being part of a dream experience happening at that time.

Back to my analogy, the magic secretary plays back some sound files, which maybe someone in a different office hears and attributes to you being present, but which you aren't "there" to experience. When you start to wake to consciousness you see the files and infer you were working on them, your partner mentions utterances consistent with one file and your brain meshes that in to part of the "story" it is writing of the dream experience (a la deja-vu).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24171230

Ahh, thanks, I hadn't thought of that! That would explain a lot.

Explains why my boss is always tellung me my ideas are not new, he is always stoned. I'll raise this issue on Monday.

This is a great setup for a dilbert comic strip actually!

If only this were a common side effect.

I randomly get such a thing - hours worth of deja vu. Even when I know I've not been in the situation before. Smoking semi-regularly actually makes this happen less often.

Something similar happened to me one of my "first times" as well (I had tried weed a number of times beforehand, but all of those times had been spaced out by months and none were very intense). I had smoked only smaller amounts before and ended up smoking many, many bowls out of my friend's bong without really thinking much of it. A moment of panic set in as I was inhaling my last hit and began to feel the effects of all the THC in my body at once, which made the high feel almost overpowering. A couple minutes later as the high began to set in in full charge I got to a point where I could not discern reality from what was in front of me; I could carry conversation with my friend or perform basic tasks, but every single second I would have a mental breakthrough that what I was experiencing was real. I still remember every moment of it, but during that experience it was as though my short-term memory had entirely ceased to function and I was forced to relive the previous moments by recalling them from my long-term memory. It definitely felt like Deja Vu, but the experience was also very unique (and frightening). The message I was left with was that drugs can be very profound, and they're likely the key to understanding many phenomena behind how the brain works. As frightening as it was, I would like to venture that deep to experience the same things again and hopefully explore that part of my brain.

After smoking a good amount I had a similar experience in which it seemed, as you said, that I stopped forming short term memories. I also had a nearly constant sensation of "just having woken up," as if every minute or so I was regaining consciousness after having been asleep. I even asked my friend several times, "Was I asleep?" to which the reply was always, "No, you've just been sitting there."

Wow that sounds eerily familiar. I remember I was standing up and was sort of okay, and then all of a sudden I just became completely unaware of my surroundings and had to think about where I was. After that it really started to kick in and I kept getting the feeling of waking up. I remember trying to walk around thinking that doing something would keep me "awake," but it just made all the actions almost mechanical. Like moving my legs was automatic and I didn't know why I was doing it until I "woke up" again.

The Virtuals seek many different modes of gnosis or enlightenment. This slogan refers to one of the foremost of these "horizonless goals:" the gnosis of "staying awake", or more specifically, always waking up. This is the most exalted yet everyday mode of enlightenment, one which is not attained so much as continually rediscovered. There is only waking up and rubbing your eyes . One of the techniques to developing these moments--which we err in considering "states" of consciousness--is to allow these very slogans to randomly erupt in the mind. Spontaneously "mad" behavior, tricks, and optical illusions are also common approaches, but the moment they become fixed as "techniques" they begin to lose their efficacy. The point is to cut against established patterns--to "kill the Buddha," as the Ch'an patriarchs say. For example, rather than staring at a beautiful object that catches your eye in the market, observe how others relate to the object.

As in English, ngHolo's Indo-Chinese dialect contains the image of the dawn as a "crack" or "break." The peasants believe this crack is real--that a day literally ossifies over its 24-hour period, trapping the earth inside a cosmic shell. The shell is then ruptured by the rising sun. But the Virtuals play with this image to emphasize both the violent and nurturing aspects of "always waking up". On the one hand, perpetual gnosis constantly rends the dreamlike illusion--or more exactly, the tentative construction--of your present plateau. On the other hand, such gnosis pervades the mind with the empty but pregnant emptiness of the glowing dawn sky.

I've had the same experience while being high! But I was alone, listening to comedy podcasts, not finding them funny because I was -sure- I had heard it before, and all the punchlines were known to me already. It literally made everything not funny because it was old news.

But the extra weird part was that after that, I'd occasionally get similar episodes while sober, for a couple of years

I think that, to some extent, psychedelic trips can "awaken" the mind to future experiences. Like LSD or psilocybin, THC seems to have some of these elements that cause an "awakening". While there may be no physical changes to the brain, you still "wake up" to new types of experiences that you did not know were possible before, and the pattern-recognition part of your brain tries to connect new thoughts to those memories. So when your brain enters a similar headspace to where you were during the original "episode," it will try to find similarities between those events (despite the absence of THC). This connection might be as simple as just listening to jokes, and your brain would connect the action of processing a joke to what you felt at the time of the high. Using its "learned experiences," your brain would try to apply the old thought-process to that moment. Then again, THC has been shown to have some persisting effects on memory and these are not fully understood yet. For all we know, it could be a long-lasting effect of THC. Either way, this sounds kind of similar to HPPD, and the idea that it could be a subconscious attempt to connect two events seems very possible as an explanation to HPPD in general.

All they had to do is to ask you to write down the answer before you heard it. And then compare to the actual answer.