It has been 2 days since the event. In the wake, I have been trying to form reasonable models of what happened in my mind during the event (nested waking dreams).

Currently, my favored theory is that I was directly experiencing the active formation of short-term memory, which bears nearly no relationship to the events involved, but exists as a bizarre dream-shorthand that the unconscious mind potentiates and perhaps stores during waking experience for later elaboration and sorting during nocturnal dreaming.

In short: I have come to suspect that the processes we call memory are all dream processes. And this is ordinarily hidden from waking consciousness because it would produce -endless fascination- if it were not.