nostalgebraist:

Another funny thing about dreams: transportation seems to play an outsize role?  Or, it does in my dreams, anyway, and I’ve gotten the impressive that it is pervasive if not universal, the way the “naked in class” dream is pervasive.

Lots of dreams about getting places on buses and trains – complicated transfers, unexpectedly ending up five counties over, maze-like stations.  Some people have similar dreams about airports (and I’ve had a few, but it’s mostly buses and trains for me).

Freshly minted bullshit just-so story: dreams play a role in consolidating memories, and memories that are very emotionally salient or stressful tend to get consolidated extra hard.  Transportation-related experiences are the closest that many people get (on a regular basis) to the “fight or flight” scenarios regularly experienced by many other organisms (time is critical, you’re doing a lot of frantic spatial navigation).  So our brains try extra hard to consolidate these memories, like they would with memories of predators and stuff

If that’s true then we would also remember transportation experiences extra well, which sounds pretty weird but is, at least, a testable prediction

counterproposed:

dreams are characterized by novelty and departure from norm

(or perhaps the ones we remember are, via some mechanism that triggers on novelty to turn short-term memories into long-term)

and transit is our most ready and familiar model for “away from the norm, prepared for novelty” reached for in assembling coherence