After my experience where, in waking consciousness, small bubbles of dreamlike experience were rising into my awareness (bearing the feeling credentials of actual experience) I began to re-evaluate my own understanding of waking consciousness and dreaming.

My current model is that the storm of dreamlets underlying ordinary consciousness is partly responsible for selecting and encoding memory. This process is bizarre if it enters consciousness… it would be like small dream scenes, complete with emotional and intellectual content, bubbling up into memory, and accompanied by a ‘history/fact’ credential.

This element poses a probable history that led to the scene and credentials it as ‘an actual (and very meaningful) experience which really happened’. Of course, it didn’t happen in the ordinary sense, it was the result of the activity of subconscious memory/dreaming processes.

Now, I think this is happening all the time. This is, at least in part, how the precursors to memory are laid down (or is an experiential metaphor of these processes), but our awareness of this is ordinarily inhibited. I was able to lessen that inhibition briefly, and thus experienced some of what is ordinarily inhibited. I think these seeds, being laid down all the time during waking experience, are collected and winnowed by dreaming at night…

But here’s the little treasure. According to my recollections of the experience itself, I divided the ‘tiny dreams’ into 3 aspects: scene, feelings/implications, history/credential. The last aspect, which contains the credential of being actual experience, is emotionally emphasized. If just this aspect were to pierce the veil of inhibition… the experience would then be precisely what happens during deja-vu.

And it would seem even more significant because, just underneath consciousness, endless myriads of these moments take place daily… in fact, it would seem preternaturally significant… but not for any identifiable reason, because what is actually being experienced isn’t history… it’s an aspect of the mystery of memory, laid partly bare to conscious experience.

It’s a bit like stepping on one of memory’s power cables…