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I had the strangest experience this morning. I was not quite asleep, not quite awake. I knew as it was happening that it wasn't real, yet it was more vivid and detailed and multisensory than any dream.
I was lying on my stomach in bed, and it suddenly seemed to me that I was in Lane's bed - just as it was when I used to visit her in Portland. Instead of the slightly sagging double bed I sleep in now, I felt underneath me the featherbed covered in black and white-striped flannel, and the cool firm cotton-sheeted futon below that. I sensed the grey Portland light flitering through the window, in an intangibly different way than the Maryland light does. I felt the chill of the air against my exposed shoulder and felt the sense memory of how cold settled into that house. I sensed the position of the bed in the room, walls behind and to the right of me. All of these sensory impressions were perfectly detailed, perfectly mundane... just as it feels to wake up in a bed and become slowly aware of your surroundings.
"This isn't real," I told myself, and I knew it to be true. But at the same time I had the vivid sensory knowledge of how it would be to turn my head and brush my face against Lane's hair. How it would be softer and finer than the hair of anyone I've slept with since. I inhaled the scent of her shampoo. I had a sense of her size and weight in the bed next to me.
"This isn't real," I told myself again, and this time I imposed some discipline: I started singing to myself in my head, a slow and rhythmic song, a song with lots of lyrics to remember, a song with no connection to her. And the song occupied my mind in an orderly fashion, and gradually I fell asleep again, and when I awoke I knew where I was.
I knew yesterday that she was on my mind, although I still don't know why. But I never imagined that I still had memories like this, or that the past could impose itself on me with such perfectly realistic mimicry.
I was lying on my stomach in bed, and it suddenly seemed to me that I was in Lane's bed - just as it was when I used to visit her in Portland. Instead of the slightly sagging double bed I sleep in now, I felt underneath me the featherbed covered in black and white-striped flannel, and the cool firm cotton-sheeted futon below that. I sensed the grey Portland light flitering through the window, in an intangibly different way than the Maryland light does. I felt the chill of the air against my exposed shoulder and felt the sense memory of how cold settled into that house. I sensed the position of the bed in the room, walls behind and to the right of me. All of these sensory impressions were perfectly detailed, perfectly mundane... just as it feels to wake up in a bed and become slowly aware of your surroundings.
"This isn't real," I told myself, and I knew it to be true. But at the same time I had the vivid sensory knowledge of how it would be to turn my head and brush my face against Lane's hair. How it would be softer and finer than the hair of anyone I've slept with since. I inhaled the scent of her shampoo. I had a sense of her size and weight in the bed next to me.
"This isn't real," I told myself again, and this time I imposed some discipline: I started singing to myself in my head, a slow and rhythmic song, a song with lots of lyrics to remember, a song with no connection to her. And the song occupied my mind in an orderly fashion, and gradually I fell asleep again, and when I awoke I knew where I was.
I knew yesterday that she was on my mind, although I still don't know why. But I never imagined that I still had memories like this, or that the past could impose itself on me with such perfectly realistic mimicry.
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I find it alarming.
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It was at the beginning of my relationship with Iain, and I was in that same state between sleeping and waking in the early morning. I had my eyes open, and I could see Iain lying next to me, with the sunlight poking through the curtain and hitting his face. I remember smiling, and reaching across to his cheek, and as my fingers touched it, I watched him transform into Chris. I was absolutely stunned, and sat bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding. I guess I had convinced myself that since I wasn't quite asleep, I couldn't really have been dreaming Iain next to me, but I had been, and I was seriously unsettled that I had thought I was touching Iain when I was actually touching Chris.
J, thinking Rivka might actually vaguely recognize this anecdote from somewhere ...
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-J
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I've had similar moments. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to have perfect recall and be able to do that at will, whenever I wanted--or, for that matter, to have triggered memories be so present. (I venture to guess that this is a similar mechanism to what happens with PTSD flashbacks, though obviously in this case it wasn't nearly so distressing.)
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This turns out not to be the case, although it is true that the task of storage and the task of access are separate, and one can be in better shape than the other.
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Your brain reacts differently to stimuli that it's recorded, whether or not you actually remember them. ("Remembering" is defined in most cases as either recall ("What did you see before?" "It was a piano.") or recognition ("Which of these pictures did you see before?" "Oh yeah, it was that one."). In other words, accession without or with a prompt.)
In the absence of recall or recognition memory, it's possible to demonstrate that encoding has occurred. (This is probably what you remember from the Oliver Sacks book.) For example, I had the opportunity once to give some tests to a man who had tried to kill himself with carbon monoxide. He had complete anterior amnesia: he couldn't remember anything that had happened since the event, which also meant that he couldn't learn new things. I gave him a test in which he was presented with pairs of words, and then given the first word in each pair and asked what went with it. He scored 0/10 (no recall). Then I gave him choices: "which word went with 'school'? Was it 'book,' 'yard,' or 'bell'?" He didn't know (no recognition). Then I asked him to just guess, to just pick one word of the three at random. And 70% of the time, he picked the correct one. He swore that he had no memory - and I believed him; it's well recognized in this syndrome that genuine anterograde amnesia occurs - but the word that just "happened" to present itself to him was correct more than twice as often as would be predicted by chance guessing.
There's similar results in healthy people, using much harder tasks. For example, you can flash a picture so quickly that it doesn't impress itself upon the conscious mind - the person doesn't remember what they saw. But if you then show them that picture again, mixed in with others, and ask the person to identify each picture as quickly as possible, they'll name the one they've seen before a few milliseconds quicker than they'll name the ones they haven't seen before. And there's converging evidence from other studies, other kinds of tasks, using similar principles.
So: those results demonstrate that it's possible to have memories for which you don't have conscious access. That's what you were saying. But these results are also imperfect (my guy with CO poisoning didn't guess 100% right) and they decay over time (if I'd waited a week, I bet his guessing would have fallen to chance levels). Those points demonstrate, respectively, that not everything gets encoded into memory and that some encoded memories are lost.
There's also a lot of evidence that stored memories are not perfect recordings of the experience or event, but are instead subject to the introduction of inaccuracies and omissions. That's an encoding or storage problem, not an access problem.
And finally, it's been well-demonstrated that we don't bother to encode everything we experience. If you take your claim literally, that all experiences are stored perfectly in memory, that would mean that on my drive to work today I encoded and stored the image of every one of the hundreds of cars, and tens of thousands of trees, that I passed. The human brain just doesn't have that much processing power.
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I can't say that I've ever felt the need to break myself out of a state like that, though. It's not clear to me from what you wrote whether it felt as if you'd have trouble getting back to reality without imposing it forcefully. Maybe I'm just not grasping the full import of "more vivid and detailed and multisensory than any dream", because many of my dreams feel so real to me that I'm unsure when I wake up whether it was a dream or the previous day. So much so that when a dream feels...well, "dreamy", I notice it.
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Yeah, I did. I didn't want to be in her bed, and reminding myself that I wasn't in fact there didn't prevent me from going on to have even more detailed sense impressions. I very much wanted to stop that at once before things went any further.
Maybe I'm just not grasping the full import of "more vivid and detailed and multisensory than any dream", because many of my dreams feel so real to me that I'm unsure when I wake up whether it was a dream or the previous day. So much so that when a dream feels...well, "dreamy", I notice it.
I've sometimes had dreams that were very naturalistic in feel, and I've even had to discreetly check with someone else about whether a particular event occurred. (It's never actually that I have no idea whether it happened or not - it's usually along the lines of a lingering doubt. "That didn't happen... did it?")
The disorienting thing about this experience was that it was so mundane, that it was completely lacking in narrative, and that it overlapped with my actual physical reality. I was lying in bed, and I knew I was lying in bed, and I had the sensory impressions of lying in bed - but the sensory impressions didn't match reality. I think I would have had a much easier time separating a dream narrative (with a plot, or at least actions) from reality. I mean, if you become even marginally more alert during a dream you can realize that you're not actually moving or speaking. But with this, becoming more aware of my physical self didn't help at all.