Are Some Dreams Forgotten Memories?

The Possibility of Emotional Time Travel in Dreams

“Got to go back.
We’ve got to go back.
For the healing …
Go on with the dreaming.”

There’s a Van Morrison song playing this morning as I start out to write this article …and I realize with amusement that the lyrics are related to the topic I want to write about: Going back in dreams, and the healing that may come from it.

This makes me smile. Was it the song that sparked the idea for this article? Or last night’s dream?

Who knows? And does it matter?

The same could be asked about the title question: Are some dreams forgotten memories?

Well…who knows? And does it matter?

I don’t know for sure, and I am not sure it matters, but I do believe that considering the question is useful when working some dreams; especially when it comes to particularly out-of-place or out-of-time dreams. I am referring to dreams in which there are some clues, when we recall the dream, that it did not “take place” in present calendar time. Inside the dream, we may notice this or we may not.

I had one such dream last night, and perhaps sharing it with you will illustrate better what I mean.

The dream was fragmented, without a linear narrative, so I won’t try to tell you the story of it. What I will share with you is that inside the dream, while participating in it, I noticed and engaged with a few objects that, now awake, seem not-from-this-era.

One object was a photo cube sitting atop a piece of furniture.

In the dream, as the dreamer, I was attracted to the photo cube because the cube was similar to the ones I inherited from my mother a few years ago when she was cleaning out her basement before a move. I have a fondness for these cubes, both because they display photos of my parents when they were each so young, and also because I like vintage room decor.

In the dream, I am surprised to find a photo cube like mine out on display and I ask the woman in the room about the photo, “Are those your parents?” She laughs and says nothing. I am curious and confused by her response. I look again and closer at the photo in the cube, and note that while the decor in the photo looks dated to the 1970s, her photo has in the background a vast desert mountain range, very different from the NJ landscapes in the photo cubes I have. That was it for the interaction.

What is curious about this to me, as I work the dream this morning, is how I interacted with the dream environment as Adult Jen, with the assumption that I was moving about in a room in 2024 (the year I live in as I write this) despite the existence of out-of-time artifacts in the room.

In the dream, I believed I was at this woman’s house for a playdate with her and her child. I believed that she was a mother and I was a mother and that her daughter was a girl from my daughter’s school. Yet, as I fleshed out the details of the dream in the morning, I realized I didn’t have any evidence to back that story up. There were no children visible in the dream scene. In fact, the dream opened with me standing in a living room that felt both unfamiliar and yet where I was supposed to be.

Many dreams open up this way: we land in the middle of a scene or an encounter with an assumption of where we are and why. When you begin working with your dreams, you realize that almost all of your dreams start out this way, with  context or background we just “seem to know” or “sense” without evidence or with evidence that’s shaky. (ie. “It was kind of like my house, but not quite.”)

Noticing and questioning one’s assumptions inside the dream is one of the first steps of working with a dream. Try it with one of your own written-out dreams. Notice your certainty that you were in a certain place for a certain reason in the dream. Try to recall the details that led you to believe this. Are there details? Often there are not. But if there are, which of those details were experienced with your senses, so to speak? And which were just a background “knowing?”  

In the case of last night’s dream, why did I believe I was a mother on a playdate in the dream? There was no child in the room I could see, but even if there had been a child “off set” so-to-speak, my own children are all teenagers or adults now, and I no longer accompany them on playdates. So the set up still doesn’t correlate with “Now Jen’s” waking life.

Is it possible I wasn’t Now Jen in the dream? As Jen-Who-Works-the-Dream, I can’t back up my story or assumption that I was an adult or a mother in this dream. Not only that, I don’t even know that I knew the woman’s name. Wouldn’t I know the name of a woman I had scheduled a playdate with?

As Jen-Who-Works-the-Dream, it doesn’t take much questioning to break down the assumption of who, when, and where I believed I was.

When I slow down the dream, and re-enter it with a focus on sensory experience, the known dream interaction becomes quite simple: I was in what looked like a brightly lit living room, nicely furnished, with a woman who looked in her 30s, with reddish-brown long hair. She was inviting and acting pleasant to me. I was less interested in her and more engaged mainly in taking in the contents of the room; my senses alive with the kind of wonder that comes when you are someplace new and you feel safe. I felt the freedom to look around and notice my surroundings, focusing in on this photo cube atop a midcentury modern sideboard.

As I began to re-enter the dream to work it this morning, I giggled becoming aware of how weak the evidence was for my story. I closed my eyes and tuned into what it was like to explore the room the way I did, without care for what the woman was thinking or worry for how my child was settling in on this “playdate.”

I laughed realizing I likely was not Adult Jen in the dream, but rather a child; maybe even Child Jen from long ago. There is a lot more evidence for that than for my story of “on a playdate” with another mom.

First, inside the I-perspective in the dream, I felt the curiosity of a child as I took in this new environment. I didn’t feel preoccupied by societal expectations; for instance, what this woman thought of me. I didn’t bother with niceties or small talk. I even acted like a child, moving about the room as I pleased, touching objects, examining them.

Is it possible I was a child in the dream? And is it possible this dream was in fact a memory of being somewhere new, on a playdate, perhaps, when I was a child?

When you consider the quantity of forgotten memories across many decades of life, there is a strong possibility this was one. And dreamers do often report remembering incidents in dreams they had long-since forgotten in waking life.

If this was one such forgotten memory, why would my Dreammaker bring it forth in a dream? 

One reason may be connected to how we experience memories when we dream versus how we experience memories when we are awake 

While awake, our memories often feel distant, apart from us. We are self-reflective about a long-ago experience rather than experiencing it first-person, with all our senses, all over again.

Awake, we don’t forget who we are Now. We don’t forget the passage of time. In dreams, we often forget who we are or we at least believe the images in our dream enough to engage with them as if they are happening in the present for us.

The experience is, in fact, very different. 

When I first recalled the dream, trying to remember the story and the details with my mind, I was confused. But when I re-inhabited the dream, abandoning my assumptions about time and place, I was able to drop into my body and sensory experience. What arose in me was a feeling; many feelings, actually. Some physical and some emotional.

Then, as I dropped even more deeply into my senses, trying to re-inhabit my dream awareness of the space with my eyes closed, I could feel myself shrinking. I smiled with delight as I explored the room. I began to feel like a child.

It felt good. It felt freeing. 

In the original dream experience, I didn’t have that bodily awareness as much as I did when I re-entered the dream while working it. In the dream, I started off by having a very embodied first-person experience, but then became so fixated on “figuring out” the photo cube that I lost my sensory awareness. I moved from my felt senses into my thinking mind.

This moving from feeling to thinking happens often in dreams, and very often in waking life, too. As we move into adulthood, we spend a lot more of our time thinking than sensing what is around us, don’t we? 

However, when we work our dreams, over time, we can learn to inhabit space differently, whether in dreams or in waking life. We re-learn how to experience spaces and people more with our senses and feelings rather than our mind (aka assumptions, beliefs, and stories.) Sometimes, we can even experience again what it was like once to move through the world with the curiosity and carefree attitude of a small child.

It takes time and intention, of course.

But perhaps one reason some dreams are forgotten memories is to remind us what we were like once and what the world around us felt like when we were that way.

To teach us how to be again that way, if we choose.