Fake dreams

I know people don’t care to hear about someone’s dreams, but I recently had an interesting experience I wish to share.  And a dream is a central point of it.

Anyway, I recently had a dream where some of my siblings found some badminton equipment.  My mom suggested having some sort of family tournament, but my brother pointed out that the last time we played tennis, Tim beat us 26-1.

A couple things about this.  First off, it has probably been forty some years since I’ve played badminton, and I don’t believe I’ve ever played tennis.  Secondly, I had the feeling that this was a cousin Tim and this happened at a family reunion, but I don’t think I have any cousins named Tim.  I went to school with a Tim, but I barely spoke with him then and haven’t spoken to him in thirty years.  The only other Tim I can think of, is a few years ago the manager at work was out for a few weeks for a medical issue, so the corporation sent in this other manager to cover.  This was a Tim, who was a bit of an asshole.  And lastly, in regards to the dream, I couldn’t care less about tennis, but 26-1 doesn’t seem like a tennis score.  Which leads me to think that “cousin” Tim was also a bit of an asshole and just kept playing until someone managed to score a point.

Now that that is all out of the way, the interesting thing I noticed was when I was groggily half-awake after this dream.  Because I had the overwhelming feeling that the whole “cousin” Tim story came from another dream I had like a month ago.  A dream I have no memory of, except as this vague reference.

This leads to two possibilities.  One, there is a part of our brains that remembers our dreams better than our awake brains does.  This doesn’t seem likely, because what would be the point.  So the more likely second possibility, is that when we dream of real events, our brain can pull from our real memories of them, but whenever a dream comes up with a “cousin Tim beat us at tennis at a family reunion” type event, the brain sort of panics when it can’t find the memory of that, so it just goes, “Oh, that was just a dream.”

I was really interested in this, because it seems once a month or so, I’ll wake up with the feeling that the dream I just had is a sequel of sorts to some other, forgotten dream.  I never looked too far into it before, because I think it always happened when I’m half-awake and things are always a blur.  But this time, for whatever reason, I was just awake enough to notice something was weird. 

I’ve spent the last five minutes trying to work “It was all a dream” into the ending of this in a satisfactory manner, but “It was all a dream” is rarely satisfactory.