THE WORLD DREAM BANK: TOPIC: MEMORY

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MEMORY

Dreams about memory and amnesia, and buried memories, including a string of archeological dreams about digging up memories.

There are also a few cryptomnesic dreams--Bond, Cryptomnesic Trolley, Lucky Starr, Kindertotenlieder and Fishel and Frish and Firebird. Cryptomnesic dreams reconstruct (often in hallucinatory detail) data presumed forgotten, data believed difficult for dreams to recall at all--lost phone numbers, codes and formulae, calendar dates, musical scores, or whole texts word for word... Cryptomnesia echoes the waking phenomenon of eidetic ("photographic") memory.

Why mention it? Well, some dream-theories claim the dreaming brain can't keep track of numbers, written texts, etc. Stephen La Berge's books on lucid dreaming, for example, recommend looking twice at texts or clock-displays if you suspect you're dreaming, because if you are, your poor old unconscious can't recall them steadily enough to fool you--they'll change! Cryptomnesic dreams disprove this assumption--the Props Department of Dreams may often not bother with perfect continuity (drama requires compression!), but dreams are able to keep track of vast amounts of precise data... if they want to.

Which means the shiftiness of dreams isn't always noise. Sometimes it's signal.

The World Dream Bank has 1500 dreams and dream images plus 500 other pages on dreamwork and shamanism, creativity, genius, art, surrealism and fantasy. Unless otherwise noted, all material copyright Chris Wayan, 2001-2006.

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	AMAZON A(U)NTS: by Wayan; 1997/10/28, a nightmare. I camp in the Amazon but in the morning find I slept on top of something disturbing...
	ARENNA, FREED: by Wayan; 130K, 1991/11/6, a pastlife/flying/freedom dream. I learn to fly from Arenna the moon-girl and Crest the dragon, in the House of Deep Memory...
	THE ARTIFACT: by Wayan; 1983/1/16. Narrative dream painting. I was a lizard archeologist, a million years from now. What I dug up threatened my marriage...
	BONES DON'T LIE: by Emily Joy; 2006/12/13, a gruesome nightmare on guilt. I know I'm a murderer; what isn't so clear is what I killed and why... CAUTION: DISMEMBERMENT, GUILT, DREAD
	BITE THE BULLET: by Wayan; 2000/1/25, a flightmare. We unearthed a sacred treasure, but now a mob of believers are out to lynch us! I better fly... CAUTION: SACRILEGE AND BAD PUNS
	THE BLAMMOR: by Wayan; 1984/4/20, four linked private-eye dreams. I'm a Fast-Food Detective tracking a kidnapper-sorceress. Castles, magic carpets... and unexpected love. CAUTION: SEX TALK
	BOND: by Wayan; 1981/10/31, a nightmare where I'm the nightmare. I'm James Bond, fighting a plot by the fiendish Eight. But I'm captured and questioned. Of course I lie to the enemy: the senators of the Committee on Intelligence Activities. Till I see myself through their eyes... CAUTION: SPY SEX, SPY MENTALITY
	BUTTERFLY HABITAT: by Wayan; 2000/3/3, a dream about amnesia. 'You always hurt the one you love', but this girl seems unaware she's proving it's true for ecology too...
	CASSANDRA AND OTTER: by Wayan; 1982/3/14, a reassuring nightmare. I take Cassandra's prophecies seriously, but she can't make sense of my future. So we go see an otter with a crystal ball. But he's put in this new security system...
	THE CONCHES: by Wayan; 1996/5/23, a dream about projections. A visit to the Conches, a strange race who are only people intermittently, seasonally...
	A CONVERSATION WITH ANOREXIA: by Wayan; 1994/6/25; two wild shamanic dreams. That day I read Hilde Bruch's "Conversations with Anorexics" and face the fact I am one. That night, in the land where anorexic horses heal, I enter the Kiva of Shamanic Pamphlets, and...
	CRYPTOMNESIC TROLLEY: by Wayan; 1991/4/22, a lucid dream of suicide. To prove I really am lucid-dreaming, I let a streetcar run me over. Mm, crunchy! Then I find out... CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT OM...
	CYCLOPS, or, THE ANSWER TO MY PRAYER: by Wayan; 1993/8/24, a spiritual nightmare. In the far future, I relive Odysseus' tale. To save my life I must give up realistic hope, and focus on... CAUTION: CANNIBAL MONSTERS
	THE EGYPTIAN GOD: by Wayan; 1991/12/21, a 7-year precognitive dream. Egyptian archeologists dig up a living god. He sees us as dolls to play with, but we've grown up... CAUTION: GOD AS A RAPIST
	ELEVEN CENT ORACLE: by Wayan; 1998/11/12, an epic future dream. I'm a migratory girl who's lost my tribe. I find eleven coins, cross the world, and pay the Oracle...
	EMPEROR OF THE GALAXY: by Wayan; 1988/1/31, a political dreamtale. The Emperor of the Galaxy can't publish his anti-slavery book as himself, so he quits to become a slave...
	FISHEL AND FRISH AND FIREBIRD: by Wayan, 2003/12/4, a seven-year dream. Why do the guests arriving for our seven-year reunion include part-time giants and dog-headed gods? They tell me...
	FORGET THE FLEURS DU MAL: by Wayan; 1983/1/1?, a poem on nightmares. In the richest regions of the sea, dead stuff wells up to meet the light. Do we have similar zones?
	GIRDERS AND DUST: by Wayan; dreamed 1983/10/23; acrylic wash on Xerox. . I dreamed I returned to a childhood park and found mostly ruin. But one magical thing survived...
	MY GLASS BODY: by Wayan; 1993/9/16, a dream on sensitivity. After I visit the Glass People, a young glass wizard stalks me home to the Meat World, and says...
	HIS MINE: by Wayan; 1985/12/2, a wild dream epic. I'm a hobbit seeking Henry Fonda's haunted gold mine, who ends up in a showdown in a shaman's bar...
	HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHT: by Wayan; 1994/4/3, a dark dream. As my grandmother is dying, I have a dream about what really went on in her house... CAUTION: CHILD SLAVERY
	THE ICE EXPRESS: by Wayan; 1982/5/19, a dream on memory vs. expression. The trans-arctic Ice Express, blinded by birds, gets off-track and blocked by oddly rectangular ice floes...
	IN THE VAULT: by Wayan; 1983/4/6, a dream of treasure. I was a sheltered girl till I entered my family's secret ancestral vault. I didn't expect to meet...
	JANEWAY'S TANGO: by Wayan, 1998/10/20, a psychic Star Trek dream. Why is Captain Janeway doing the tango with another woman, in a creek, wearing a mermaid tail?
	KINDERTOTENLIEDER: by Oliver Sacks; 1974, a musical dream I dream of German dirges I don't know. I hum them for a friend, who shocks me by asking "Have you abandoned any children, or burned a manuscript?" Right on both counts...
	KUBLA KHAN: by Samuel Coleridge; summer 1797, an interrupted dream-poem In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree (at least until that visitor from Porlock barged in...) CAUTION: POET ON PAIN MEDS
	LACED WITH TERROR: by Wayan; 1999/5/3, an anti-nightmare. Researchers show me weird little objects like shoelaces that drive people mad with fear...
	LOVE IS REAL, REAL IS LOVE, BUT...: by Wayan; 1993/5/30, a musical mystery dream. Singing a Lennon love song on a planet of giant women provokes first wonder, then disbelief. Why?
	LUCID ON THE MOON: by Wayan; 1980/2/23, a long-term psychic dream. I'm on the run, on the moon. Cyborgs toss bombs at me. Yikes! Is this what melted Mare Orientalis? CAUTION: NUCLEAR IRRESPONSIBILITY
	LUCKY STARR: by Wayan; 1964, an early, cryptomnesic dream. I fell asleep reading a book I'd read years before. I finished it in my dreams. Every word in place. How?
	LURK: by Wayan; digital collage of a year's dreaming, 1995. There's power in dark memories--creatures of the deep strata. But the flowers of now are just as real...
	MEMORY SNIP!: by Wayan; 1999/5/15, a dream on the cost of kindness. My friend Mark does something I thought impossible: removes a snippet of my memory. Disastrous! CAUTION: VIOLENCE... SORT OF
	NO “I": by Wayan; 2003/10/22, a dream of identity loss. I’m in San Francisco trying to throw Sauron’s Ring into the Cracks of San Andreas. But a sexy sorcerer steals my sense of I! How can you act without a self?
	NOT THREE!: by Wayan; 1996/11/11, an encouraging nightmare I was wrong. I didn't survive three assassins. It's been seven! Why'd I forget the others?
	ONCE A HERO: by Wayan; 185K total, 9 images, 1998/10/22, a raw dream-series. Sexy dreams of Chinese archeology, authorized by the fairies, make me face that my family abused me...
	PISSING MEMORIES: by Wayan; 1999/5/20, a dreamtale on non-sabotage. I desperately need to pee, but my bladder's full of two kinds of emotional trauma, and each blocks the other! CAUTION: BATHROOM PSYCHOLOGY
	RAZOR GHOST: by Wayan; 1974/5/5, a nightmare posing a problem. A man slowly walled in by neighbors till he died, is now a mad, murderous ghost. And he's me! Can I exorcise MYSELF? CAUTION: VIOLENCE
	RECOIL: by Wayan; 1995. Digital portrait of dream figures. Puzzled me why I (the girl on the left) was so outraged about the gift of a perfectly nice levitating flower... CAUTION: NUDITY, INGRATITUDE, WITCHCRAFT, ELVIS
	RIBBING: by Wayan; 1992/12/25, an assertive dreamtale. After seeing 150 years of family photos, I dream of being teased by time-traveling cheerleaders, and...
	THE RIFT ZONE: by Wayan; 1987/11/27, a long-term psychic dream. I'm not ambivalent--I'm confused! I live here by the Rift Zone and I don't. I'm single and not. Two lives!...
	THE SAN DIEGO CENTAURS: by Wayan; 1985/1/9, a slice-of-life dream. In San Diego, I fly around disrupting the UFO games in the junkyard, till I reconnect with a centaur friend
	THE SEX WORKSHOP: by Wayan; 1997/4/6, a dream on taking the next step. The teacher of our sex workshop picks me for a demonstration in front of everyone. Gulp... CAUTION: WELL WHAT DO YOU THINK?
	SHOCKWAVE: by Wayan; 1996/7/27, a predictive nightmare. My childhood home explodes into a vast pyroclastic cloud that comes boiling toward me, miles away... CAUTION: DOOM
	SINGULARITIES: by Wayan, 1994. Digital image of mental state revealed by dreams. Black holes can be scary enough outside you, but what if you have dormant ones inside you?
	SORRY WE DRANK ALL THE BEER: by Wayan; 1986/6/3, a dream on the use of rage The future. Humanity's trapped--no energy. Because aliens looted our world before we evolved! Now...
	TAROT: THE MOON (Ebb Tide: Memory): by Wayan; 39K. Tarot card, 3x5", 1978-1981. Time, tide, cycles... At ebb, the hourglass drains, the tide recedes, life hides in the cracks...
	TEMEMTIM: by Wayan; 1995/3/3 and 3/16; two linked archeology dreams. My cold-sensitive dinosaur friend makes a find at our archeological dig by thinking like the Old Ones...
	TEN THOUSAND MAD GHOSTS: by Wayan; 1996/9/3, a psychic nightmare. A toxic site in Silicon Valley isn't a chemical spill, but angry ghosts, killed in a camp and forgotten... CAUTION: THE CAMP TURNS OUT TO BE REAL
	THEY DON'T BELIEVE ME: by Wayan; 550K total, 15 illus., 1989/10/4, an unbelievable dream. My dog and I are abducted by aliens who turn us into cats. We escape, and turn feral to survive. I'm back in school now, and in therapy... but how we got back, and what happened along the way, even my own shrink won't believe... CAUTION: LEWD SQUID AND KLEPTOMANIAC BUGS
	THE THIEF OF DREAMS: by Wayan; 200K, an illustrated dream-play, 1996/11/29. I was a mermaid trying to find Count Coyote's stolen dreams, so I could marry my human girlfriend... CAUTION: GAY MARRIAGE, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
	UNCORK A SUB GOD: by Wayan; 1998/8/11, a warning dream. Exploring a sunken sub, my buddies salvage a live bomb. Toss it back, but the next find may just toss us...
	WIRES: by Wayan; 1999, 14 x 17", crayon, resolving a recurrent childhood nightmare. I was bodiless but trapped. All I could see were these moving wires. Whenever a knot drifted by... CAUTION: MADNESS, TORMENT, TELEPATHY, SEXUAL REBELLION