Holographic Dreaming and “Moving On” in the U.S.A.

Abstract

Contemporary psychologists investigate the dream’s role in memory.¹ Yet, our existential experience of the dream is one of forgetting— of being immersed in a reality that seems to stretch back in time to an origin beyond remembrance. At the next moment, we wake and the dream vanishes from the horizon of consciousness, sometimes completely but even when we retain it, our reports to a friend or confidante are often faltering. By mid-morning, if we do not record or relate them, dreams are usually well beyond recollection. This amnesia, I argue in this chapter, offers clues to those memory processes that do indeed define dreaming.