Category: confabulation

Memories from a pandemic: On recollection, confabulation, and verisimilitude!

Keith S. Taber

I had gone into the office to collect something. (My office is in the Science Education Centre of the University's Faculty of Education, located on the site of Homerton College Cambridge.) Due to the global pandemic, and government advice (and later instructions) the office had been in lock down for some time. I'd been away for so long that aspects of the room seemed unfamiliar! The room was something of an oblong, at the back of the building near the technician's area. It was rather cluttered: that was certainly familiar, but it struck me, having been away for some weeks, just how cluttered.

I was pretty sure I needed to collect a lead, but could not see the lead I wanted. I noticed some leads with very thick insulation connecting to the computer – were these SCART leads: I did not remember these being used in the office. But that was not what I was looking for.

I've been in this office quite a few years (well over a decade now) and whilst looking around I found some things I had rather forgotten about. There were some small toy cars – of the kind that that were used on some gravity powered racing tracks when I was a child. These were approx. 1:64 scale, and made to roughly replicate real models, and painted in various colours. It might seem an odd thing to have in an adult's (there may be an unjustified assumption there?) office, but for my first decade in the University I had largely worked in teacher education and led on the physics teaching component – so that provided a good excuse for having lots of different toys!

Another thing that was initially unfamiliar was a large card. This was about A3 size, or originally A2 but folded like a greetings card. Inside were various other post-card sized cards attached, as well as some confectionery wrappers! What was this? It was coming back to me. One year I'd sent a message out to all the students who had finished the course (this was presumably our one-year Educational Research course), and many had replied from all over the world, and I'd made this as a record. Had I sent them all chocolate, and they had returned the wrapper with a greeting? Or had they sent that the confectionery to me from different locations? I was not sure now – the details were bit hazy.

Coming back into the office, and indeed into Cambridge from the satellite town where I live, for the first time in a while was a little odd. I could see into the school next door to our site. There were not many children (most were now at home, with just key workers' children and vulnerable children being in school to be looked after) but those there seemed to be playing happily (both outside and inside classrooms – I could not see anyone supervising) and unperturbed by the current emergency. This seemed reassuring, if a little odd.

I could also see into a classroom of an adjacent college (not a college of the university, but one of the many independent sixth form colleges that allow, mostly overseas, students to study at Cambridge at university entrance level). There were a few young people visible studying. A teenage boy and girl were sitting next to each other working on something together. They were even touching I noticed – nothing inappropriate in normal times – but these are not normal times.

I'd been to the College Combination Room (a staff room for all those working in Homerton – whether academics, clerical, gardeners, or whatever). It was almost empty. I had a conversation there with a colleague I recognised. I think I had wanted to say something about the prime minister being in hospital, along the lines that if he were to die from COVID-19 that would be a terrible loss to his family and friends, but might do wonders for getting across the government's message about social distancing – his one death could save hundreds. But although this was a thought experiment along the lines of those 'trolley' dilemmas used to explore ethical reasoning, I thought it might come across as a little callous. (It is one thing to conjecture scenarios involving the deaths of unnamed imaginary people, but not a real, ill, human being.) [Since publishing this, I have learned this evening on the BBC Radio News that Mr Johnson's health has deteriorated, and he has been placed in intensive care. I do, of course, wish him well along with others suffering from the disease.]

I saw it was 14.00 (2 p.m.) and felt I should have gone to the main faculty building to take a class (although there are no classes now, so just force of habit there I suppose). I wanted to get a cup of coffee to take with me to the class (force of habit, again?), but I saw the coffee machine, and all the tea making paraphernalia, were gone. I assumed that this was because of the current emergency – having a place where people can come to get tea and coffee would encourage the social mixing that we need to avoid. The College must have taken all the refreshments away.

On leaving the Combination room I moved into a corridor (known as Pauper's Walk) but, as I entered the corridor, I saw another colleague enter from the far end. Current protocols suggested to me that I needed to stand back against the wall, and allow her to pass on the other side. However, she had not seen me for a while, and seemed to want to come up to me to talk.

Back in my office, I noticed that some things had been moved since I had been in regularly (pre-pandemic). Some filing cabinets had been shoved out of position, apparently to get access to some large cupboards built into the walls. I did know what was in those cupboards – actually I am not sure I had ever noticed them before. I assumed the technicians used them for storage and had been in to get something, and had needed to shift the cabinets across the floor.

I also noticed that the builders (who had been on site an interminable time, working on one project after another) had made a small hole in the floor in the corner of the room. Through that I was able to see the large, and very 'modern' looking, installation beneath the floor of the store room – presumably the new power plant to heat the building. I could see it was subject to a continuous, and quite extensive, waterfall. I wondered if this was necessary. If the building is closed at the moment, was this not wasting a good deal of water? Or, I wondered, was it a safety precaution that the core needed to be kept cooled even though we were not meant to be operating at the moment?

I had given up on finding the lead I was looking for, and decided I should head for home. I felt a little uneasy about this. The restrictions were still in place. If I was stopped by a police officer, could I really justify my going to work as essential if my main justification had been to look for a lead that I could manage to work at home perfectly well without? I was also uneasy about getting the bus back from the centre of Cambridge to my home – did I really want to be using public transport at this time?

It was then that I started to experience what might be considered cognitive dissonance. Why had I not been concerned about getting the bus into Cambridge? Actually, I did not recall having got the bus into work. The only other viable way I could have got there was cycling, which given the distance, my fitness, and my cargo trike, was, although certainly possible, not an undertaking I would likely have made and immediately forgotten. It was at this point that I released that I did not remember going into work because I had not done so. It was a dream, and, realising that, I woke up at home.

But it was a dream like so many of my dreams – experienced as real, and involving a lot of remembering of things that never happened. (I do not mean remembering the dream when awake, but the experience of remembering in the dream). There is an independent college just adjacent to our building where I often see students studying as I pass by. But no school. The combination room was a real (or at least realistic) memory, as was the colleague I talked to there and the corridor outside – but the other colleague who approached me in the corridor (although seen with clarity in my dream) was not someone I know, or as far as I know based on any real person.

The office I was in (in my dream) was not actually my office, or any office we have in the building (much more like an office I shared at the Institute of Education in London for a year when a visiting fellow there), and was in a different part of the building to my real office.

There is no power plant built under our store room (though last Summer something like this, sans waterfall, was built under the Homerton College lawn). I had left my laptop power lead in the office when I brought the laptop home, and I had considered whether I should go back for it (before we were officially banned from the University buildings) and see if there was anything else I needed before the lock-down: but had decided it was not necessary or a good use of time, or sensible in the circumstances. (But why could I not find the right lead in the dream?)

I have various things in the office from my days working on the PGCE teacher preparation course (a magnetic pendulum for example), but I am not sure if there are toy cars (perhaps there are, and I have forgotten them in my waking life). The large card displaying messages (and chocolate wrappings) from various students has no real counterpoint, but could perhaps be seen as a composite of various post cards and gifts I've been given or sent by students over the years.

Why bother writing about a dream at such length? Because it made me think about memory. In the dream I experienced things that are real, some that were realistic enough (the non-existent colleague in the corridor seemed as real as the real one in the Combination Room) and some that seem (now) fantastic distortions or syntheses of past experiences.

But what was most notable, to my mind, is the role of memory in the dream. When I found the cars, and the card, I was initially nonplussed, but then remembered them from years before (even though, in the case of the card at least, I could not have actually remembered something that never existed). When there was no coffee available in the Combination Room I remembered the current restrictions and inferred this was a precaution the College had taken.

When I found the hole in the floor of my office, I remembered that the builders have been excavating and installing equipment beneath the store room next door (they had not, and the store room was not next door to my actual office). However, a shiny new futuristic apparatus as part of the heating system had recently been open to incidental passer-by inspection as part of ongoing (and indeed interminable) works elsewhere on site – perhaps conflated in my dream with the ground source heat pump under the lawn. In my dream I recognised and remembered things that were real, imagined but possible, and fantastic (the waterfall installed in the excavated cave under our store room, even if not exactly where "the sacred river, ran, through caverns measureless to man"), with equal verisimilitude, as seeming equally likely and trustworthy. The imaginary colleague was as real to me as the remembered real one.

I had no doubts during my dream that I had been in my office, even if it seemed a lot narrower than I recalled. I did not remember having toy cars there, but immediately saw why they might have been useful in teaching. I was initially not at all sure what to make of the large card with the various additions attached inside – but then I 'remembered' (actually, constructed an account of) what I had done years before, and the responses this had initiated, and what I had then done to commemorate those response from past students. It seems a little odd that in my sleep I could 'remember' this unlikely object, but could not remember having gone into work (where there is much genuine experience on which to have constructed a recollection). Perhaps I was just reaching the point where I (my body) was ready to wake, and so my dream became lucid, initiating my awakening. (The thinking we do in dreaming seems worth the effort at the time, until we realise it is 'just' a dream.)

It is perhaps not surprising that in dreams we recognise, and even remember, things that are not real, things that are distorted, and things that are syntheses or different experiences, or that are actually post hoc justifications that enable us to make sense of otherwise confusing (dreamed) experiences. What struck me, though, was how this phenomenon – the way memory seems to cheat and fabricate during dreams – was actually no different from how research suggests memory works in our waking lives. When students tell me they have been taught something that I realise is incorrect in their science lessons, I am always aware they may be recalling correctly, but it is also quite possible that what they 'remember' being told was not what the teacher actually said at the time.

So we might readily dismiss as false things we thought we were remembering when dreaming. But we usually trust a memory we have when we are awake, although research has shown that the things we remember clearly in our waking lives can also be distortions – or even confabulations – as our mind guesses and fills-in what we infer must have happened in order to to make sense of current experience.

A sobering, perhaps even arousing, thought.