Anjuan Simmons Technology Translator

Emptying the Recycle Bin of the Mind

Yesterday, I drove past a police officer on the highway at a fairly high rate of speed, and I was sure that I would be pulled over and given a ticket for exceeding the posted speed limit. However, for whatever reason, the police officer did not pursue me. Yet, last night I had a dream that I did get pulled over and given a citation. Why did I have that dream? Did I think about getting pulled over as I sped past the police officer, and my mind stored those thoughts as a visual memory that I later experienced while sleeping? I am sure that dreams have fascinated mankind since the first time a person told another person that strange mental images were experienced while sleeping. Numerous theories have arisen to explain why we dream, but my dream last night caused me to think about an additional explanation.

Is it possible that for every event we experience, our minds store the alternate outcomes of each event? For example, maybe a person asks her boss for a raise. While waiting for a response, her mind (unbeknownst to her) imagines the possible outcomes. Maybe her boss will say no and think that she is presumptuous in making the request? Or perhaps she will be fired on the spot? Let's say she does indeed get the raise, but later that night while sleeping she dreams that she is looking for another job because she was terminated instead of rewarded. Could that dream be the result of her mind working through the memories she stored while waiting for her boss to respond? Maybe her brain was performing a "clean up" process where it goes through the mind and removes any stored memory that did not actually happen. Perhaps the mind wants to free up space by not storing these phantom events in a similar way that emptying the Recycle Bin on a Windows computer frees up extra space on the hard drive. This may explain why dreams are hard to remember after we wake up because our minds are "emptying the recycle bin". Our brain may be protecting us by getting rid of "false memories" so that we don't confuse them with "reality memories". This process may have to run when we are sleeping because our minds "lock" certain resources that have to be used to properly function while awake. Maybe we have to be unconscious for these resources to be free to clean up these alternate memories. This may also explain why dreams sometimes involve strange combinations of events. Could it be that the mind stores memories in different parts of the brain, and the dream process operates in a linear fashion traversing different memory paths and combining them as it goes? If so, then a better metaphor for understanding dreams may be defragmenting a hard drive instead of emptying the recycle bin.

If dreams do function as a sort of "garbage collection" utility function, then there are other implications. Perhaps dreams can be studied to determine if a person is either capable of great genius or of great horror. I am not sure if a study has been done to compare the dreams of great scientists to the dreams of socio-paths, but it would be interesting to see the results if one was conducted. Maybe we would be surprised to see similarities where we may have expected differences. Furthermore, the dreams of people afflicted with diseases like Alzheimer's may reveal that their brains begin to display "bad sectors" similar to the errors seen in hard drives. Is it possible that we may one day better predict the onset of dementia based on the content of a person's dreams?

It could turn out that linking modern computing to the study of dreams may be the best way to understand them. Perhaps studying one of mankind's greatest creations rather than man himself may lead to deep insights into how humans work.