> I can't imagine how cluttered my mind would be if that bizarre stuff didn't blissfully fade within a few minutes of waking up. Not necessarily true, if (as t

> I can't imagine how cluttered my mind would be if that bizarre stuff didn't blissfully fade within a few minutes of waking up. Not necessarily true, if (as the hypothesis goes) dreams are just an alternate (incorrect) decoding of your existing memories, experienced as a side-effect of the process of memory reconsolidation — the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake of what's in your short-term memory buffer. If that hypothesis holds, then "remembering" dreams wouldn't be like "remembering" regular memories, requiring independent storage of the data about them, but rather would be "free" as long as you retain the memory that the dream is an incorrect decoding of — the "memory" for the dream just being a pointer to the original memory, plus a pointer to the mental trick to reinterpret it. Such data wouldn't take up more than a trivial amount of space to "remember", any more than procedurally-generated background art in old video games take up space to "store." (But, of course, the downside is these dream-pointers are probably not "strong references" to the things they point at from the brain's memory garbage-collection perspective — which is why dreams are so easily forgotten in the first place. Forget the original thing, and you forget the dream, whether you intend to remember the dream or not!)