Dreams and Memory

[Spektator]

Rather than continue hijacking Drew599's thread on his predictions, I thought it might be useful to start one on the topic of dreaming and remembering the dreams--accurately or inaccurately.

I don't often record dreams in my diary/journal, but I found one that I'll bet you guys can debunk in a flash. I'm going to transcribe part of the journal entry, but I'll disguise names a bit.

Monday, March 1, 1993

Bad dream last night: a big explosion in the World Trade Center, and for some reason S-- was there. Crowds running out into the streets, the streets filled with boiling thick smoke. Screams and sirens. I woke up sweating. I know that S--'s office is on Houston, many blocks from the World Trade Center, but in the dream she was working in the center. Woke up about three, had a hard time getting back to sleep....

Now, when 9/11 occurred, though I remembered the dream, I did not regard it as precognitive, and I'm sure you know why. S-- was my editor at the time on a textbook project, and when I told her about it, she thought the dream was strange but not particularly disturbing. By the way, she was not affected by 9/11; she and her coworkers did go to a high floor in her building and they saw the collapse of the twin towers, but she was not in any way involved and did not know anyone who was.

I visited the library and looked in Learning and Memory, 2nd edition, ed. John H. Byrne (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research, 1992) and learned that faulty recall of dreams has been studied. Evidently if a person describes a dream and then at intervals over the next weeks re-describes it for different people, the details tend to change and shift with time (typically, the dream becomes less imagistic and more narrative). Over time, one of the more common changes is that the dream reporter recalls the dream as happening at a different time (different date) from what was originally reported.

 

[sophia8]

Monday, March 1, 1993

That was three days after the first bombing of the WTC.
Explosions and the World Trade Center were both on your mind. So was S--, as you were working closely with her. Maybe she was having some personal problems that she had told you about, so you incorporated her into a dream involving disaster, or the project looked like heading towards disaster.
Disaster generally was on your mind.

ETA: I presume you're asking us to explain an apparently precog dream, since you recorded it straight away and not from later memory.

 

[Spektator]

Got it in one, Sophia8! You are exactly right. It was just a few days after the first bombing, and my "mental map" of NYC made me think that the WTC was much closer to Houston Street than it actually is. On the day of the bombing, I called--had a hard time getting through, which added to my anxiety--and finally talked with my editor and made sure she was OK, but obviously it was a traumatic incident, so a couple of days later, I dreamed about it. It was clearly a dream born of stress, not a forecast of what would come later.