\n\nAnother funny thing about dreams: transportation seems to play an outsize role? \u00a0Or, it does in my\u00a0dreams, anyway, and I\u2019ve gotten the impressive that it is pervasive if not universal, the way the\u00a0\u201cnaked in class\u201d dream is pervasive.
\nLots of dreams about getting places on buses and trains \u2013 complicated transfers, unexpectedly ending up five counties over, maze-like stations. \u00a0Some people have similar dreams about airports (and I\u2019ve had a few, but it\u2019s mostly buses and trains for me).
\nFreshly 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. \u00a0Transportation-related experiences are the closest that many people get (on a regular basis) to the\u00a0\u201cfight or flight\u201d scenarios regularly experienced by many other organisms (time is critical, you\u2019re doing a lot of frantic spatial navigation). \u00a0So our brains try extra hard to consolidate these memories, like they would with memories of predators and stuff
\nIf that\u2019s true then we would also\u00a0remember\u00a0transportation experiences extra well, which sounds pretty weird but is, at least, a testable prediction
\n
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 \u201caway from the norm, prepared for novelty\u201d reached for in assembling coherence
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