Can Emotional Impressions from Dreams Remain Or Continue Even After the Visual Imagery And Details Are Gone?
Have you ever woken up from a dream carrying a powerful emotional feeling, yet found yourself unable to remember what you actually dreamt about? The images may have disappeared, the storyline may be impossible to reconstruct, and the people or places in the dream may have become indistinct. Yet the emotion remains. This raises a question: Can the emotional experience of a dream survive in our memory even when the dream itself has largely been forgotten? The answer appears to be yes. Emotional impressions and the recollection of specific events are related, but they do not necessarily follow the same course when we remember an experience. When the feeling outlasts the dream Dream recall is often remarkably fragile. We may remember fragments immediately after waking, only to find that they disappear within minutes. A familiar face becomes unrecognizable, a location loses its significance, and an elaborate sequence of events dissolves into disconnected images. Interestingly, the emot...