Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

The Non-existing Memories

 Science was never one of my strongest or favorite subjects.Don't get me wrong, it is interesting and I like to learn how things work. I think the brain is probably what fascinates me the most. It is intriguing to think about how it works and even its digital equivalent -- computers.

I don't understand how a bunch of 0s and 1s can equate to a colored image of a certain dimension to appear on my screen. I don't understand how I am connected to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who then provides me with access to the International Network "Internet" and the World Wide Web.

Similarly, I don't understand how the electrical impulses in my brain equate to memories. What intrigues me the most are those foreign, often physics-defying places my brain takes me at night. I gave dreams some thought in college and what causes them.I wanted to try to control my dreams. I wanted to have a dream in another language, specifically Spanish. I don't think it happened during my college career.

When I lived in Spain, I finally had a couple of dreams in Spanish, but most were silent nightmares, most likely brought on by my real-life fear of heights. Being in places that made me face my fear was a frequent occurrence in Europe. Most of the dreams involved me climbing to some height, usually on a building, and then realizing I didn't have anyway down. Usually I would let go and wake up.

A few weeks ago I dreamed I was passing through border control in an Islamic country. I had never been there before. There were were several weird parts, but nothing made the dream special. Two weeks later, I revisited that dream within another dream. And then last night, I revisited it again -- I even had more success crossing the border having learned from my previous adventures. Somehow in my dreams I had memories of the previous dreams.

It was pretty interesting how my brain would remember other dreams within a dream -- a memory that didn't really exist. I didn't look any of those three dreams up in a dream dictionary, but it somewhat makes since for the dreams to be symbolic. I wonder how much we could really learn from our subconscious minds.