A few nights ago, I had a strange dream. In my dream, I was talking to an old friend I haven't talked to in a number of years. He then mentioned a trip to Tokyo we had both taken years earlier and which I had completely forgotten about. Images from the trip flashed into my mind, including a party on the beach. Dream-me couldn't believe I had forgotten the trip.
In real life, though, I've never been to Tokyo. I've never been anywhere in Asia. The trip and the memories of it were completely fabricated by my subconscious.
For a long time, I've thought of dreaming as a way for the subconscious to sort of expunge itself of clutter. It picks a few memories fed to it by conscious perception, and then it mixes them together and takes a little joy ride down the strange path it has created.
The Tokyo thing, though, doesn't make any sense in that regard. There are no memories from which the subconscious can draw. The only exceptions are movies and tv shows that take place there. Maybe my subconscious pulled something from there. But it's been years since I've seen anything set in Tokyo, so why would my dreaming brain call it up now when it usually draws from more recent imagery? What was the spark?
I don't have any answers to these questions. It's the fact that the questions themselves exist that I find interesting. I have no explanation for the thoughts in my own head, and that's really a mind-boggling thing to consider. The subconscious mind is truly an unexplored frontier. "Here be dragons," as the old saying goes. Or, in this case, here be a beach in Tokyo.
