Where do dreams go when they die?

 

"Where do bad folks go when they die?

They don't go to heaven where the angels fly.

They go to a lake of fire and fry.

See them again til the fourth of July."  ~ Nirvana, "Lake of Fire"

No, I'm not suddenly adopting a dualistic interpretation any alleged afterlife scenario. It's just a random earworm related to my recent inability to remember my dreams.

Lately, my lack of ability to recall any of my nocturnal adventures has gotten me wondering about the operational parameters of consciousness, as they relate to my puny human brain. I don't have any facts or research to substantiate what I'm not calling "my theory," so don't worry about having to refute some hypothesis. These are just speculations and analogies that I'm throwing out here. I haven't even read the owner's manual to know what the specs are on this little consciousness device that I am operating. Mine didn't come with one.

So, I'm thinking that the brain, marvelous as it may be, has it's limitations as far as processing power and storage capacity. In this way, it is very much like a computer. There's ROM, with an integrated, hard-coded operating system for the body. You don't have to consciously think about breathing, maintaining blood pressure, growing your hair, etc. And you have very limited ability to affect these autonomic functions. No matter how hard you try, you just can't scrunch up your forehead and sprout even one new eyelash. These functions are programmed at the factory, and you just can't fuck with them. 

The ability to think and reason utilizes the RAM area of the brain's memory. You can adopt new philosophies, strategies, routines and subroutines using this flexible storage area. Short term memories, things to buy at the grocery store this week, current projects, plans, etc. This simple writing exercise, for example, is using up a ton of RAM as I'm searching around for things to try to illustrate my point. 

At some point the items stored in RAM get booted to the more long-term storage area of the hard drive. They are still accessible, but the files may be compressed or corrupted. It may take some creative mnemonic device to retrieve them. Mine are a mess. There's stuff in there from the '70s, '80s, '90s and up, jumbled with current projects that have been shelved, lists of things to do that get procrastinated into oblivion. They are still there, but the file path is missing, so good luck getting at them. Maybe hypnosis or some kind of external scanning device yet to be invented will be able to successfully unearth them. Or not.

 

Lastly, there's the Cloud. This is a mythical storage area, yet to be proven to exist in actual reality. It is the Akashic, the Matrix, the universal consciousness, God's Book of Life, where all things are recorded in infinite minutia. I may not remember what I dreamed last night, said last week or did on a Tuesday fifteen years ago, but don't think it hasn't been stored on the Big Guy's server somewhere. He's worse than the NSA like that. Nothing gets erased and not one iota of existence is forgotten, from day one to the end of eternity. 

 

Ok, that last one leans kind of heavily on the Judeo-Christian model. Sue me. I was in a cult for six years, plus I was born in a western culture that is imbued with so-called Christian beliefs. I have tried to uninstall that program, but it has a lot of hidden files that still want to pop up and re-install themselves,  messing with my perception of reality. Whatever that is. Reality, I mean. That's an egg I have yet to crack.

 

Maybe I'll get to run an external standalone program, in the form of psychedelic therapy, and some of these things will become clearer. Maybe it will work as a kind of scanning anti-virus program where I can evaluate each of my preciously held beliefs and thought patterns and go about consciously deleting the ones I don't want or aren't helpful. Or maybe I'll just see unicorns and rainbows or snakes and dragons. Who knows.

 

It's Saturday. I know I dreamed last night, but I was robbed of my cliff notes at the moment of awakening, so I'm left without anything to account for my time in dreamland. That's why I decided to write this pitiable excuse for a note to the teacher: "Andrew couldn't recall his dreams because the dog ate his cerebral cortex." 

 

Actually, I think it is because I've been using too much of my RAM on trying to learn new songs and memorize lyrics. I cannot do this easily, and it taxes my brain's resources to get these things to stick around in an easily accessible area. You can't very well sing and play a song if you have to pull it off of an old hard drive that is in need of a good defragmenting. The latency will kill the moment. Buffering. Buffering. Little hourglass spinny thing. Blue line, 65% completed. You know. It sucks being a 386 in a quantum computing world.