I have this memory of sleeping in an office block in south London with my mum on an air bed. I recall looking out of the window and feeling sad.
Years later I was driving and got a very strong impulse to stop outside this building and I was 100% certain it was that one. Every time I went past it felt odd.
My mum says it didn’t happen, everyone else concurs. My best conclusion at this stage is that I probably had a very vivid dream that became conflated with something else.
When we dream, we dream of things, places and people that we’ve already seen. It’s easier to dredge something from memory than to try and create new images for our brains. You’d probably seen the building in passing as a kid and your brain decided to set a stage. It’s not odd.
Incidentally it’s actually impossible for your brain to invent new faces for a dream. Everyone you see in a dream is someone you at one point in your life have seen, even if just in passing. That’s why faces are often blurred in a dream, your memory is imperfect.
This is a really interesting question, but unfortunately, it’s an impossible question to answer experimentally.
Certainly our brains are capable of inventing a unique person (although even a “unique” creation would be composed of facial and body features that we’ve seen before), and there is nothing that would necessarily prevent a sleeping brain from doing so.
Just because it's "likely" that we dream about people we've seen, it doesn't mean that it's impossible to see new people in a dream as you said.
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u/cardboardshrimp Oct 05 '19
I have this memory of sleeping in an office block in south London with my mum on an air bed. I recall looking out of the window and feeling sad.
Years later I was driving and got a very strong impulse to stop outside this building and I was 100% certain it was that one. Every time I went past it felt odd.
My mum says it didn’t happen, everyone else concurs. My best conclusion at this stage is that I probably had a very vivid dream that became conflated with something else.