Entries tagged 'cat:Memories'

Telling Old Stories For No Important Reason

Entry created on 2024-09-28 author:steeph (324) cat:Memories (2) cat:Stories (1) cat:Writing (4)

I think I'm prone to telling stories from my past when I'm left with the choice of topic but there is no obvious topic right now that has to be discussed. So at moments at which I want to write something on here but not because there is a specific thing that I want to say or explore, I may fall back to telling about things that I did or made or remember from 20 years or so ago. That might seem nostalgic at (many) times. BNut I don't think that that's a bad thing at all. When I write about things I remember fondly, I welcome the feelings such memries evoke. Yearning or unfulfillable longing something from the past that can't be brought back isn't usually part of this. I like sharing some memories, like how my PC hobby was like decades ago were the industry and especially the tech itself was different. And on here, I decide what's worth talking about. Yes, this is a bit of an apologetical entry. Whatever.

I'd love to read from you if you either had different or the same experiences of things that I write about. There's a link for e-mail comments beneath each entry.

When somebody says they're reprocessing old memories it's expected to mean that they're looking back and coming to terms with their past. I think can also be meant in a good way. I'm remembering something and decide to explore my memories of it further; maybe because I'm inmdtrigued of the feeling of remembering something that I had completely forgotton about for 20 years, or simply because it's a nice memory. Maybe I'm looking at old photos of things that made, people I've met, places I've travelled to; and while more and more memories from that time come back, I eventually put them into my new perspective. I know I'm also changing my memories when I do this. The psychology of how memories are formed, saved, remembered and altered (and sometimes faked entirely) is very interesting. There are so many papers to read about memory-related researtch that suggest that most people most of the time assume that (at least their own) memory function differently from what it actually does and is granted much more credibility than it deserves. But anyway, it can be vbery interesting to bring memories from way back into connection with what you've experienced since then and your reality today.

What I'm doing here when I wriote about an idea for something that I had 20 years ago or something that I made back then, I'm slowly catching up with my desire to document certain things from my head. Text is the medium that feels right for that. A few years ago I've accepted that I will never have the perfect website which contains everything that I want it to, complete and structured and nothing boring. Because I never got anywhere when that was my goal. Now I'm just putting thing in entries and that's that. That also includes things that even 20 years ago I wanted to publish on the web but never did properly. I'm not doing it in the way that I decided then was the proper way. I'm just writing down thoughts and memories so that these memories don't belong in the "Oh, I never ended up deing this. Maybe I should at some point." category in my mind. Sometimes it feels like I have accomplished something that I had in the back of my head for 20 years simply because I write here that I once had this idea and still think it's a kind of neat idea but never did anything with it. And sometimes I delete it again right away because it really wasn't interesting in any way.

Life is just the accumulation of memories.

Entry created on 2024-07-24 author:steeph (324) cat:#100DaysToOffload (26) cat:Life (5) cat:Lucid Dreaming (10) cat:Memories (2) cat:Philosophy (4) lang:en (178)

This is not really a philosophy that I live by or use to form my conception of what my or anybody's life is. But I find the thought that everything that happened in the past is only part of reality in the form of a resedue in our memories interesting. That isn't really true. If I break a cup that I use every day, I cannot use that cup to drink tea from. And if I build a house, I can live in it in the future even though the action of building it and all the experiences I made during that time is nothing but a memories. But applied to activities that don't transform part of the physical reality in a specific and definite way, it has some truth, and realising that gives me a curious feeling.

Somebody asked me once, after I gave an introductory talk about Lucid Dreaming, if what somebody experiences during a dream is somehow more real than a dream or still just a dream. I've answered in a way that I thought as honest but was maybe not a clear answer. I said it's still a dream and what stays after the dream is nothing but the memory of it. That's not wrong. But had I taken the time to give a longer answer, I should have also explained the context in which I consider this to be the case. Regular dreams are usually incredibly volatile, especially for somebody who doesn't pay much attention to them and doesn't even try to remember them better. For most adults that's how they remember the majority of the few dreams that they remember at all. Most lucid dreams, it is often said, are a very positive experience. People who train to become lucid dreams mostly consider a lucid dream a success that comes way less often than they wish. These circumstances alone make a lucid dream easier to remember. Some see the memory of a lucid dream in a different class from non-lucid dream memories all together. But of course there can be lucid dreams that you don't remember for long, or you forget the details after a while, or you don't recall at all after waking up (How would you know?). If you don't consider a dream special, it will fade more quickly. If your head is full of other pressing thoughts, if you're depressed or are currently very worried, and if you don't write them down, the memories of a dream will fade quicker. In my experience, given enough time, the memories of lucid dreams will fade into the same jumble of vague memories from long ago, which might be correct or complete or not at all (which doesn't correlate with the sense of how correct or complete they are, btw). That isn't to say that they weren't worth the effort I've put into.

All of that is also true for waking memories, though, isn't it? Yes, we keep much more of what we experience while awake because the short term memories are functioning a lot better then. But years later, what's left is a fading memory unless it is a special memory to you in some way or you do something to keep the it alive. And the jumble those waking memories fade into is the same where all the dream memories go. So, the more small, unimportantant memories accumulate, the more likely it will become that a dream memory is confused with a waking memory. I believe that, to a certain extent, this may be normal. To an extant to which it is not concerning, I mean. Did I see a deer in the northern fields where you usually keep away from two years ago? Or did I only dream that? Deer have no relevance to my life, nor have those fields or anything that seeing a deer north from the village would imply. So I don't care. This is something else than believing that what you dreamed last night to be true minutes or hours after waking up. That could become an awkward day at work or worse. It is also something else to come to the wrong conclusion from a reality check when you're awake. What I believe to be normal to some extent is the confusion of basically irrelevant memories.

In many ways, dream memories and waking memories are more similar than I thought for a long time. They are the same in some ways. A lot of the apparent differences can be explained by the lack of short term memories while dreaming or during the process of waking up (which can be both at the same time). So, are lucid dreams just dreams of which fading memories are the only thing that remains? Yes, just like your last night out, your holiday in Japan, all the films you've watched and podcasts you've heard. And no, just like everything else you experience, a lucid dream re-shapes and re-inforces neural connections and thus influences how you think, how you experience things from now on and what you will do in the future.