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Last night I dreamed that I got a call from a potential employer that I had interviewed with some months ago. I remember being handed a phone by someone saying "This call is for you". I could barely hear the caller. It took me a few seconds to recall the voice.
She identified herself as Ronnie from the firm ‘strategic research services' or something like that. I then recalled interviewing with her and I recalled the building where the interview took place and the emotions I felt at the time of the interview and so forth. I remembered that I was given some sort of test during the interview....a question like: ‘What would you do if this sort of situation developed' I remember suggesting a solution that was a little innovative and risky but I went with it anyway and then wrote off the possibility of me getting the job when I heard nothing after the interview.
After remembering all these things while on the phone with Ronnie Ronnie's voice came back and she said some nice things about me and basically offered me the job. I was hesitant to accept as it was not ideal for me for many reasons. So I said to Ronnie: "Should I think about it a couple of days and give you a call?"
When she did not answer I repeated her name a couple of times, thinking I lost the connection. I checked the phone to see what if anything was wrong and then woke up.
Upon awakening I realized that the interview referenced in the dream had indeed really happened BUT it had happened in another dream NOT in ‘real life'.
That other dream had occurred at least one or two months ago. I started to remember other bits of that ‘interview dream' after I was awake for a few minutes. I had completely forgotten about it but my dreaming Mind had not forgotten it! It is as if my dreaming mind had access to a store of dream memories that my waking mind could not access unless prodded to do so by special conditions like this job dream I just had.
Now if the dreaming Mind has its own store of memories it is possible that that store of memories could grow over time. If that is possible then the dreaming mind may draw on that memory store to produce special kinds of knowledge that can be used in waking life.
Many scientists however dismiss dreams as so much meaningless noise associated with sleep. They believe that no new knowledge can accrue from the act of dreaming. Although many pre-modern cultures thought differently, the reigning prejudice (and really that is all it is given the scientific evidence in support of knowledge derived from dreams) in the modern world that dreams do not contribute to knowledge.
The occasional report that breakthrough scientific or technical insights happened in a dream seems not to have made a dent in the modern prejudice against dreams. Nor has the recent demonstration that both forms of human sleep (REM sleep and NREM) contribute to memory consolidation processes-even though it is hard to see how one could cumulate knowledge (either asleep or awake) without memory consolidation!
But there is evidence that the dreaming mind constitutes a knowledge producing system. People who have kept records of their dreams over many years have repeatedly noted that dreams often reference one another-that a theme or image from one dream gets repeated in another dream and so forth. Those repeat images and themes are sometimes not traceable to daytime residues or events. Instead they find their source in previous dreams.
The images were born in dreams and they reappear in later dreams suitably changed due to the passage of time. These dream images do not reflect waking emotional life. Instead the dream images have a life or logic and rationale of their own. But that is about all that we know of them.
The great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget seemed to think that dreams cumulated specialized forms of knowledge as well. He argued (Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood. New York: W. W. Norton) that dreams (like play) exhibit "preoperational" schemas of thought that characterizes forms of cognition common in children before they reach adolescence. According to Piaget, in dreams we adults return to preoperational forms of cognition and then, when we remember a dream, we try to translate this form of cognition into an adult language. The image in dreams constitutes a first-draft form of imitation that the child uses in waking life to learn adult behaviors.
Affect-laden imitative imagery derived in dreams supports preoperational thought in the child and grows into a system of images that can be used in various forms of symbolic activity, from dreams to play to art and imagination.
All of these considerations suggest therefore that the dreaming Mind may regularly access a specialized memory system and it is this specialized memory system that yields the unique cognitive features of dreams themselves.
