It sounds like you’re suggesting dream recall is “my brain filling in fake details to a story when prompted,” which seems the much more unlikely explanation than “I have dreams and then remember them piece by piece.”
What I’m suggesting is, on the one hand, not actually anything quite so specific as that, and on the other hand something potentially far stranger and less straightforward.
Before I say more about this, I want to detour very briefly to address the rest of what you say in that paragraph:
For one, I usually, but don’t always manage to remember my dreams.
This is not at all inconsistent with even the suggestion that you guessed I was making. (There’s no reason why the ability to confabulate can’t vary from one day to another, for example.)
For another, if I could reliably make up details as interesting as the stuff that happens in my dreams I would write much better fiction.
Likewise, there’s no reason to expect that you should necessarily have conscious, on-demand access to whatever mechanism lets you confabulate dream-recollections.
Now, as for what I meant by my comment…
Daniel Dennett has an excellent essay (which was published as part of his book Brainstorms) called “Are Dreams Experiences?” If you can find it, I would highly recommend reading it.
Now, to be clear, I am not proffering Dennett’s essay as support for my claim (indeed, I have yet to make any clear positive claim). The reason I bring it up is because in this essay, Dennett challenges what he calls the “received view” of what dreams are (i.e., the notion that they are experiences that one has while asleep, which may then be recalled upon waking, much like any ordinary experience one has may later be recalled). He offers several alternative models for what dreams could be, and explores the implications of those models, what evidence exists for them, etc.
The key thing that I got from Dennett’s essay—and from other reading I’ve done about dreams, and from my own experiences—is that we should be much less confident than we are in our standard view of what dreams are.
Let me suggest the following experiment …
It so happens that I have, at one point, done basically this exact thing (it was a while ago, but as I recall, it was an assignment for one of my psychology courses in college); and a bit less formally but more recently, I’ve many times deliberately tried to notice, upon waking, what my recall of dreams was like (for example, taking melatonin for insomnia made me notice this sort of thing more, for reasons which may be obvious to many people who’ve also taken melatonin). And what I got from my self-observation was that the notion of “recalling what I experienced in my dream(s)” is (at least for me) not only mostly impossible, but mostly incoherent as well.
What attempting to write down or recount a dream feels like, to me, is confabulation. I am telling a story, but I know—as I am telling it—that I’m making it up. The details were different. It was all different—stranger—more disjointed—less coherent—but I can’t remember any of that; it’s fleeing my mind from the very first moment I try to recall it, the moment I wake; all I can do is try to fill in the details with guesses, cliches, etc. But it’s wrong; it’s much more mundane than the “actual dream” (if there was such a thing). (Indeed—as Dennett also points out in his essay—it often seems like trying to recall the dream makes the memory of it flee faster.)
So when I realized all of that (which wasn’t difficult; the realization came basically as soon as I started trying), I stopped trying to recall my dreams. I didn’t, and don’t, want to fool myself.
It seems to me that waking experience has many features which we take very much for granted, which are fundamental to… well, to being able to apprehend the world in any kind of coherent way… and which we are often tempted to ascribe to dreams, but which dreams often (usually?) simply do not have. These are things like: sequence; causation; object permanence; object identity; linearity; integration of sensory perception; and others in this vein. But we lack the language necessary to speak of experience that lacks these features. It may be impossible even to properly imagine such experiences while we are awake. And yet not only do we blithely describe dreams in more or less the same terms as we speak of waking experiences (with only minor and paltry deviations), we in fact regularly impose on them a narrative structure that even our waking experiences—which do have all of the aforementioned properties—usually lack!
So the fact is that I simply do not trust any account, produced by one who is awake, of what one’s dream was like. I have never seen anything to suggest that I should expect such accounts to be reliable, and much to suggest the very opposite. (Note that the fact that we have to describe our dreams in words makes it all the worse!)
To add to all of that, I have several more prosaic reasons for the view that I hold—other aspects of my experience that I base my comments on. One is that I often don’t recall my dreams at all, period—not even for a second. I awake, and all memory of the dream is gone instantly. I know that I dreamed; but that is all. Another is that I often spend the latter part of my sleep period falling out of and into a sleep state; certainly I am not awake enough, during such times, to be consciously recollecting anything—but neither am I dreaming (or perhaps I am, but then I do not recall even the fact of dreaming—much less the content of any dreams I have in such a state).
So, you see, I really recognize none of my own experience in what you describe; quite the opposite…
What attempting to write down or recount a dream feels like, to me, is confabulation. I am telling a story, but I know—as I am telling it—that I’m making it up. The details were different. It was all different—stranger—more disjointed—less coherent—but I can’t remember any of that; it’s fleeing my mind from the very first moment I try to recall it, the moment I wake; all I can do is try to fill in the details with guesses, cliches, etc. But it’s wrong; it’s much more mundane than the “actual dream” (if there was such a thing). (Indeed—as Dennett also points out in his essay—it often seems like trying to recall the dream makes the memory of it flee faster.)
This is my experience as well. I actually wrote most of the following paragraph before reading your comment, in response to alkjash’s comment above:
My own experience with recounting my dreams afterwards is that often, they include elements which somehow seem to make sense within the dream but afterwards turn out to be incoherent. In order to construct even a half-way coherent narrative—that is, not one that sounds like it could have actually happened, but one which could even be understood—I often need to simplify things and explain it in a way which isn’t quite what happened in the dream, but rather the closest approximation of something coherent that I can construct out of the incomplete skeleton that the dream gave me.
The two pieces of evidence I mentioned are not inconsistent with your model, but they seem to certainly be weak evidence for mine.
I will chalk it up to minds being more different than I expected. If you can offer any testable predictions about the “confabulation hypothesis” I’d be happy to try them, but it seems far-fetched to me.
Again I want to emphasize that I’m not making any specific, strong claim. “Confabulation” is one possibility (broadly speaking), but there are several ways to construe what I’ve described, under some of which “confabulation” is not really the best way to describe what’s going on.
As for testable predictions, well… it’s hard to say. Certainly if what I describe as my experience is nothing at all like yours, then that’s evidence against my “model”[1] of dreams—at least in your case! My model would predict my experiences, and antipredict yours, after all.
I again refer you to Dennett, who, in his aforementioned essay, gives some interesting differences in predictions between types of theories about the nature of dreams. I do warn you, however, that little of what he has to present is stronger evidence for the individual case than individual experience is. In other words, whatever Dennett has to say, I don’t expect it’s likely that you’ll change your mind about what sorts of things your dreams are. (Not impossible, mind you; just not likely.)
As you say, minds are different.
[1] It’s not really a model, of course, but more like an anti-model—a set of intuitions / anecdata / considerations / etc. that rule out certain models.
What I’m suggesting is, on the one hand, not actually anything quite so specific as that, and on the other hand something potentially far stranger and less straightforward.
Before I say more about this, I want to detour very briefly to address the rest of what you say in that paragraph:
This is not at all inconsistent with even the suggestion that you guessed I was making. (There’s no reason why the ability to confabulate can’t vary from one day to another, for example.)
Likewise, there’s no reason to expect that you should necessarily have conscious, on-demand access to whatever mechanism lets you confabulate dream-recollections.
Now, as for what I meant by my comment…
Daniel Dennett has an excellent essay (which was published as part of his book Brainstorms) called “Are Dreams Experiences?” If you can find it, I would highly recommend reading it.
Now, to be clear, I am not proffering Dennett’s essay as support for my claim (indeed, I have yet to make any clear positive claim). The reason I bring it up is because in this essay, Dennett challenges what he calls the “received view” of what dreams are (i.e., the notion that they are experiences that one has while asleep, which may then be recalled upon waking, much like any ordinary experience one has may later be recalled). He offers several alternative models for what dreams could be, and explores the implications of those models, what evidence exists for them, etc.
The key thing that I got from Dennett’s essay—and from other reading I’ve done about dreams, and from my own experiences—is that we should be much less confident than we are in our standard view of what dreams are.
It so happens that I have, at one point, done basically this exact thing (it was a while ago, but as I recall, it was an assignment for one of my psychology courses in college); and a bit less formally but more recently, I’ve many times deliberately tried to notice, upon waking, what my recall of dreams was like (for example, taking melatonin for insomnia made me notice this sort of thing more, for reasons which may be obvious to many people who’ve also taken melatonin). And what I got from my self-observation was that the notion of “recalling what I experienced in my dream(s)” is (at least for me) not only mostly impossible, but mostly incoherent as well.
What attempting to write down or recount a dream feels like, to me, is confabulation. I am telling a story, but I know—as I am telling it—that I’m making it up. The details were different. It was all different—stranger—more disjointed—less coherent—but I can’t remember any of that; it’s fleeing my mind from the very first moment I try to recall it, the moment I wake; all I can do is try to fill in the details with guesses, cliches, etc. But it’s wrong; it’s much more mundane than the “actual dream” (if there was such a thing). (Indeed—as Dennett also points out in his essay—it often seems like trying to recall the dream makes the memory of it flee faster.)
So when I realized all of that (which wasn’t difficult; the realization came basically as soon as I started trying), I stopped trying to recall my dreams. I didn’t, and don’t, want to fool myself.
It seems to me that waking experience has many features which we take very much for granted, which are fundamental to… well, to being able to apprehend the world in any kind of coherent way… and which we are often tempted to ascribe to dreams, but which dreams often (usually?) simply do not have. These are things like: sequence; causation; object permanence; object identity; linearity; integration of sensory perception; and others in this vein. But we lack the language necessary to speak of experience that lacks these features. It may be impossible even to properly imagine such experiences while we are awake. And yet not only do we blithely describe dreams in more or less the same terms as we speak of waking experiences (with only minor and paltry deviations), we in fact regularly impose on them a narrative structure that even our waking experiences—which do have all of the aforementioned properties—usually lack!
So the fact is that I simply do not trust any account, produced by one who is awake, of what one’s dream was like. I have never seen anything to suggest that I should expect such accounts to be reliable, and much to suggest the very opposite. (Note that the fact that we have to describe our dreams in words makes it all the worse!)
To add to all of that, I have several more prosaic reasons for the view that I hold—other aspects of my experience that I base my comments on. One is that I often don’t recall my dreams at all, period—not even for a second. I awake, and all memory of the dream is gone instantly. I know that I dreamed; but that is all. Another is that I often spend the latter part of my sleep period falling out of and into a sleep state; certainly I am not awake enough, during such times, to be consciously recollecting anything—but neither am I dreaming (or perhaps I am, but then I do not recall even the fact of dreaming—much less the content of any dreams I have in such a state).
So, you see, I really recognize none of my own experience in what you describe; quite the opposite…
This is my experience as well. I actually wrote most of the following paragraph before reading your comment, in response to alkjash’s comment above:
My own experience with recounting my dreams afterwards is that often, they include elements which somehow seem to make sense within the dream but afterwards turn out to be incoherent. In order to construct even a half-way coherent narrative—that is, not one that sounds like it could have actually happened, but one which could even be understood—I often need to simplify things and explain it in a way which isn’t quite what happened in the dream, but rather the closest approximation of something coherent that I can construct out of the incomplete skeleton that the dream gave me.
The two pieces of evidence I mentioned are not inconsistent with your model, but they seem to certainly be weak evidence for mine.
I will chalk it up to minds being more different than I expected. If you can offer any testable predictions about the “confabulation hypothesis” I’d be happy to try them, but it seems far-fetched to me.
Again I want to emphasize that I’m not making any specific, strong claim. “Confabulation” is one possibility (broadly speaking), but there are several ways to construe what I’ve described, under some of which “confabulation” is not really the best way to describe what’s going on.
As for testable predictions, well… it’s hard to say. Certainly if what I describe as my experience is nothing at all like yours, then that’s evidence against my “model”[1] of dreams—at least in your case! My model would predict my experiences, and antipredict yours, after all.
I again refer you to Dennett, who, in his aforementioned essay, gives some interesting differences in predictions between types of theories about the nature of dreams. I do warn you, however, that little of what he has to present is stronger evidence for the individual case than individual experience is. In other words, whatever Dennett has to say, I don’t expect it’s likely that you’ll change your mind about what sorts of things your dreams are. (Not impossible, mind you; just not likely.)
As you say, minds are different.
[1] It’s not really a model, of course, but more like an anti-model—a set of intuitions / anecdata / considerations / etc. that rule out certain models.