accounts of our memories are like meticulously made reports in laboratory notebooks of carefully observed results obtained by using poorly calibrated apparatus designed for a different type of experiment. They may faithfully reproduce information, but that information is not entirely reliable.
Is remembering something a sufficent reason to believe it happended?
I came to the realisation that something I had remembered, was not actually something that had happened. I had experienced it as a genuine memory – but on reflection soon afterwards I knew full well it was not the case (indeed, could not have been the case). This could have been rather disconcerting in other circumstances. That is, if this had occurred during what we consider a normal state of consciousness. Even so, it gave me pause for thought.
Memories and false beliefs about memory
Memory is one of these things we all know about, but tends to be generally poorly understood. Nomenclature such as 'remember', 'recall', and 'forget', are part of the mental register – the set of terms that are used in everyday discourse to talk about mental experience and related phenomena (Taber, 2013). Our familiarity with this kind of talk probably encourages most of us to feel we have a pretty good handle on the basis of what memory is; what remembering is; and what it means to forget.
Yet, actually, this is not generally so. Research shows that even when people recall events with clarity and are confident in the accuracy of these recollections, their memories may not be trustworthy. Certainly much of what we remember is basically sound (though I am not sure anyone has a good estimate of just how much!) But details often get changed. And sometimes, more than just details.
We represent experience in memory but this is not usually akin to making a video record (even if some people experience their memories as if watching a recording). Memory (the faculty) seems to have evolved to give us an abstracted, generalised impression of past experience. From an evolutionary perspective, we have inherited the kind of memory that was selected for in the context of how our ancestors lived.
Related experiences are often represented without proper discrimination. So, if you regularly get the train to work, you have a memory of this – but not discrete memories of each separate occasion. At least, not unless you are one of those rare people who have been gifted, or perhaps cursed (Luria, 1987), with an eidetic memory. Arguably, for most purposes, a generalised memory of a much repeated scenario is more useful than a large set of records of similar events distinguished by variations in incidental detail. There is value in remembering how to make a cup of tea or unlock a door: less so in having a record of each time one has made tea or unlocked doors.
Memory as a reconstruction
Research shows that memories are often in part constructed – representations ('in memory') activated in remembering offer a partial account, which is filled-in with feasible details BEFORE the memory is presented to consciousness. The person reporting the memory does not know which elements were actually recalled, and which then added.
This has been shown, for example, by testing people a few days after they have been told an unfamiliar story. Typically, people get some points correct, forget some details, but also change details, or even add material that was never in the original. But the person 'remembering' (actually, reconstructing) the story does not necessarily have any less confidence in the fabricated elements, as they have been integrated into the account pre-consciously: 'out of mind' so to speak. Reports of memories are usually honest – it is just that they are honest reports of imperfect memories. Eye witness testimony is famously unreliable, but not because most people lie.
In this way, accounts of our memories are like meticulously made reports in laboratory notebooks of carefully observed results obtained by using poorly calibrated apparatus designed for a different type of experiment. They may faithfully reproduce information, but that information is not entirely reliable. We cannot trust such results just because someone provides an honest report of what was noted down in the record.
Memories are somewhat like those historical reconstructions based on incomplete accounts filled in by a dramatist to offer a full narrative for the viewer, perhaps with some scenes moved to locations that seem to be more keeping with the overall progression of the storyline (or are just considered more visually compelling). Crick and Watson may not have had those specific conversations as portrayed when walking across the backs, or in The Eagle, but there is a sense in which the story has greater coherence and truth if shown that way. Not a strict, historical, truth, of course – but perhaps it creates a better mythology, or acts as more effective pedagogy, or just offers a better aesthetic?
"Look, according to the script here, they are going to film us having this conversation on the tennis court." (Tim Pigott-Smith as Francis Crick and Jeff Goldblum as Jim Watson in a still from the 1987 Horizon special docudrama, 'Life Story' {a.k.a. 'The Race for the Double Helix'}.)
Memories are not fixed. Each time you activate a memory you change the trace. It is therefore possible to 'plant' memories. The first time you are asked to recall the crime scene you are asked if you saw a knife and report not. But when asked again at a later date, you may now associate a knife with the scene (as you had been invited to think about it in that context previously, the image has got linked to the memory). This can be done deliberately, but criminal investigators have to be very careful of accidentally planting memories.
People sometimes recall events from very early in their lives at an age research suggests is before distinct autobiographical memories can be laid down. Presumably, what is actually being remembered is having previously imagined the scene years before when told about it.
I can picture myself in my pram telling enquiring passers-by my name and address – but that is actually my memory of a report of someone else's memory. I almost believe I recall escaping from my playpen by emptying out the toy box and turning it upside down to act as step. But that could be a fabrication I have been fed. I do know these are memories ofstories about me and not actual memories of the events, but perhaps some of my actual early memories of events were also 'planted' without my being aware of this?
It is all in the mind
After all, what we actually recall is a representation ofour experience, which is effectively mental. We have mental experiences when we are out acting on the environment (e.g., walking in the woods) – but also when watching a film, or listening to a story, or simply daydreaming. And, indeed, we also have mental experiences when we sleep.
Researchers have found children giving convincing and committed accounts of how when they were younger
they had to attend hospital for a minor emergency, or
when they drifted away from caregivers at the shops and got lost
although these were imaginary events which the researchers themselves had previously planted, and which parents confirmed did not reflect any actual event the child had experienced. (Such research raises ethical issues – now we know memories can be suggested by researchers, is it ethical for investigators to continue to carry out such studies? If so, what are the limits on the kinds of memories it is acceptable to try and plant?)
False memory syndrome
A very serious consequence of this phenomenon has been the recognition that accusations against parents and teachers and other caregivers of child abuse can arise from the inadvertent planting of false memories when children are questioned. Careful probing of the children's memories may be needed over sequences of interviews. Unfortunately, that very scenario also provides suitable conditions for leading questions to plant false memories.
Identifying cases of child abuse can be especially challenging as young children may not understand what has happened to them (especially in cases of sexual assaults) and/or may be traumatised. Young children are also less able to distinguish memories of real and imaginary events.
Recalling previous mental states
There is a procedure undertaken in psychology where a youngster is shown a biscuit box, say, and asked to guess its contents. For example:
Cookies.
The child is then shown that the box actually contains something incongruous:
Pebbles!
They are then asked what they had thought was in the box when first shown it, before they saw inside:
Pebbles, of course.
This is normal behaviour. The child gives what for them is a genuine response – but it is false. It is not a lie – it would hardly be convincing if it was. With maturation a child becomes able to distinguish what I think now from what I thought before – but below a certain age this distinction is simply not available.
That particular result is specific to young children, but a degree of memory distortion is normal for the rest of us – indeed the best of us, according to the historian/philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn,
"Not always, but quite usually, scientists will strenuously resist recognising that their discoveries were the product of beliefs and theories incompatible with those to which the discoveries themselves gave rise."
Kuhn, 1984/1887
Kuhn was not suggesting that scientists were seeking to claim a prescience they did not have, but simply that they too are effected by the difficulty of returning to an earlier state of ignorance before they slowly built a more nuanced and deeper understanding of a field. The instrument they used to expand their understanding – their prior understanding – was the very thing that was being modified. That is something teachers need to bear in mind – many of those things that now seem obvious and straightforward to the expert were obscure and complex when met as a novice.
The dilemma of 'recovered' memories of abuse
It is obviously imperative to detect and stop sexual abuse, but it became clear that in some communities there seemed to be an inordinate amount of such child abuse going on, often involving strange rituals more at home in a Hammer Horror film. Children who were perfectly happy at home were being separated from their families on the basis of an investigative methodology which unfortunately created the 'evidence' of abuse (and made it indistinguishable from any real memories of actual abuse).
Some adults in therapy also found they gradually uncovered (or perhaps, actually, gradually constructed) previously undetected memories of childhood abuse, and consequently became estranged from parents that they now labelled abusers. Of course, such 'recovered' memories could be real, but sometimes they were not, and unfortunately recall does not come with metadata tags to tell us how and when what is being recalled was first represented in memory.
How is it possible that adults might live for decades without any conscious awareness that their parents had abused them as children, only for this to come to light when they entered into a psychoanalytic relationship with a therapist? Supposedly, the memories of something so awful, and often inconsistent with an otherwise happy family life, had been repressed.
There are different views on whether false memory syndrome leading to fabricated accusations of abuse is very widespread as has sometimes been claimed (an 'epidemic'), or is just an occasional aberration (Goodman, Gonzalves & Wolpe, 2019; Otgaar, Howe & Patihis, 2022). The challenge is that when there is nothing to corroborate memory with, then all we have is the memory; and memory is fallible and susceptible to distortion.
Memories are like conceptions
The research into student conceptions in science makes it clear that a learners' knowledge of a topic does not exist on a single dimension from ignorance to knowledge – they can have knowledge that is more or less complete, but also alternative conceptions that are more or less canonical. In a similar way, memories can also be more or less complete, but also more or less accurate – indeed, more or less fabricated.
Memory and sleep
We know that sleep is essential to good health and, indeed, that healthy sleep must include dreaming. It is normal to dream every night, although we may only remember dreams if they occur just before waking. Clearly, sleep must be physiologically important as sleeping involves taking the significant risk of losing awareness of our environment when, for example, predators may be around.
Sleeping leaves us vulnerable. Of course, some creatures are less vulnerable than others when they nod off. (Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay)
One of the areas that sleep is considered to support is memory consolidation. That is, without good sleep, our ability to update and maintain our memories suffers. I do not think the details of this are well understood – but the effects of sleep deprivation are well known (such that it can be used as a form of torture).
No one really knows for sure the function of dreams, or whether, perhaps, dreams are just an epiphenomenon, a kind of by-product of the maintenance processes going on in the brain during sleep. There is a very long tradition of trying to read meaning in (or into!) dreams (the story of Daniel in the Bible Old Testament for example) and the interpretation of dreams was a key part of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Dreams are such a part of our lives, it often seems they must have significance – but there is no strong scientific support to suggest this is so. Given the nature of most of my dreams, I find this reassuring.
Autobiographical and semantic memory
Our memories represent both autobiographical and semantic material. That is, we recall specific events in our lives as well as abstract material such as Ohm's law, the theory of natural selection, or the molecular structure of benzene.
So, if our sleeping brains are maintaining memory function and this involves activating memory traces, and we experience – or make sense of – some of this as dreaming, then why do my dreams involve me in 'social' situations, but I do not (that I can recall) dream about, say, molecular shapes or circuit configurations? After all, August Kekulé supposedly discovered the structure of benzene when he was drifting into sleep.
Does this reflect my lack of genius – would an Albert Einstein or a Richard Feynman dream in abstract mathematical symbols? I do not, at least, not that I notice. Generally my dreams are very mundane, which is why one of last night's dream's seemed out of place.
A dream party (no teaching involved)
I was at a kind of Hollywood-type party – a party attended by many of those who would be labelled by the general public as 'stars'. To be fair, I did not recognise (or perhaps, better, actually notice) who most of the people there were: rather I just had the impression that these were 'stars'.
I should point out that I do not tend to go to those kinds of parties (obviously, I do not tend to be invited to them), and indeed I am not really one for parties. So, I am not sure why I was dreaming about being at one.
More typically, my dreams involve teaching situations. Yet, I never actually teach anything substantial in these dreams – more often I am
getting myself ready to teach a class,
organising a class to get ready to work, or
on my way to teach a class (which for various reasons never gets started)
as if my dreaming brain has access to autobiographical material, but does not know any chemistry or physics or research methodology or anything I might actually teach. It seems as if I do not have access to my semantic knowledge for use in my dreams. This raises an interesting question.
If dreaming is considered to support the processes of memory consolidation – why do we not dream about the material we are learning?
(And although I am not taking any formal classes – I read books and listen to podcasts which would provide plenty of subject matter.)
Is it just that this processing happens at a more abstract level that we cannot picture directly in dreams?
Why are dreams not more realistic?
What has long intrigued me about dreams is that although I do sometimes dream about my late wife or close family: in general the people in my dreams seem to be made up, like characters in a fiction. I do not dream about students or classes I have taught but rather populate my dreams with fictional people. This seems odd, as when I am awake I can remember many students I have taught and it would seem more economical for my brain to use their images than construct people de novo. 1 Why are my dreams so 'CGI-heavy' (as in 'computer generated imagery') when it is known that requires a lot of processing?
And this is not just people. In my dreams I am in buildings or in streets, etcetera – but when I awake and can recall a dream I realise that the house I was living in, in the dream, is not my house, or any other house I have ever lived in. Or know. (And when there is an exception, the house seems to have been moved! 3)
The classroom in a dream is not one where I taught, even though there are several very familiar classrooms where I taught a great number of lessons over a period of years. The same applies with the teaching institutions more generally – when I move around these buildings in my dreams I use hallways, go to canteens, and the like; pass thought entrance areas. All these things are experienced as familiar to me – in my dreams, the people, rooms and buildings and sometimes even streets and town centres all seem familiar – but only till I wake up. Then it is immediately clear they were constructed – in effect imagined – and not recalled from real life. Perhaps they are sometimes recalled from a previous dream, but not recalled from my actual 'awake' life. They are familiar in sleep – but not known from my waking life.
[There is a theory that we live to dream. Our real lives, the lives that really matter, are the lives we have in sleep when we dream. In order to maintain these meaningful lives we need the support period when we are awake and eat and, so forth. From this perspective, the question of why we dream disappears. Instead we might ask why we need to be conscious when awake: presumably this makes it easier to find sustenance, mates, shelter and the other things that allows us to continue the human lineage, and to regularly settle down for a good night's sleep.]
There are exceptions. Once when younger and at my parents house, I dreamt that I flew out of their house down the road, turning into the adjoining road then right at a junction into another road that led to the local shops, over the roundabout and headed down to town. I will not bore you with the details except to say the flight was exhilarating rather than scary…and was (certainly, subjectively seemed) detailed. I saw the roads and buildings in detail, and, as far as I could tell when I awoke, accurately. This seemed to me more memory than imagination…with one obvious caveat. In the dream I was seeing everything from maybe 10 metres above the ground looking down. I had walked along those roads hundreds of times, but only from a vantage point of less than two metres above ground level.
Maybe there is a good reason we do not dream realistically too often. When I have had dreams where I interact with real people then I have sometimes become confused later. I have had to realise that 'no, that was just a dream'. If one does not realise on waking, perhaps one would never know of the mistake – but that could have consequences. ("You told me to give the house to Marxist anarchists!")
And awaking from a conversation with a loved one, only to then realise that must have been a dream because the person is no longer with us, is difficult: waking up and realising that was not a real experience, and it could not have been, tends to ratchet the grief process back up a few notches. Spending time with the loved one, only to wake and realise – again – she is gone offers a bitter-sweet counterpoint and reprise to the old adage that it is better to have loved and lost…
All the same, it does suggest that if dreaming is largely a constructive process that requires the brain to design and simulate new but realistic-seeming environments and populate them with convincing androids, then that is an awful lot of mental work. Perhaps it calls upon 'memories' at some level, but it seems largely the work of imagination.
Transitioning to sleep
I had slept for about four hours, but then awoke wishing to use the bathroom. That is not unusual, and more often than not I crawl back into bed and straight back to sleep. On this occasion I just lay there waiting to drop off again. I can often tell when I am about to go to sleep as my visual cortex does its version of the iTunes visualiser and I see various shapes and colours gradually appear and then start moving around. Sometimes, not. But I have a strategy to avoid lying awake worrying that I am not asleep. I go on adventures.
So, I take sea voyages, and spend time relaxing on my private tropical island with its bananas, coconuts and pineapples – I have built quite a repertoire of scenarios I slowly develop knowing that usually the story does not get very far before I drift off somewhere else. (That is, I have represented in memory my previous imagined experiences of my repertoire of getting ready for sleep scenarios.)
However, this time my body did not seem to want to go back to sleep, and I seemed to still be lying awake waiting for sleep hours later. This went on so long I could eventually hear the voices of others in the house, now up to start the day; and eventually they were even leaning over me in bed to try and get access to the breakfast things. (That should have been a clue, even if my sleeping self had forgotten there was no one else in the house.)
Then, I was at the party.
I 'remembered' (…in my dream…) that Elton and I go back a long way (Elton publicity shot accessed from Wikimedia, with apologies to Bernie)
My friend, the superstar
I did not really know the people there – I do not mix in these circles.
But then I saw Sir Elton John, and realised there was someone at the party that I did know well. Elton greeted me, and at that moment I recalled how we regularly engaged in repartee on the morning radio show. In that instant, Elton being there and acknowledging me, fitted with a long-standing and familiar part of my life.
Except, of course, this was completely fabricated. I have never met Sir Elton, and the Elton in my dream was for some reason Elton from the 1980s. And I certainly do not appear on any morning radio show, with or without him. Elton (I am pretty sure) does not know I exist, and would not be seeking me out at the kind of parties that I do not in any case go to, and that I would not be invited to (and that I would not really want to go to even if I was invited. Though meeting Elton would be cool.)
So what? This is just a dream – so, it is not real. I do not usually dream of celebrities. (Though Joe Root tuned up in a dream a while back.2)
Why Elton? I have no idea. I do have a lot of his records and rate him highly as a songwriter/singer/pianist. But my dreams would be pretty crowded if all the musicians who moved me made an appearance. 4 Perhaps I just associate Elton with glitzy parties – and I did not spot Freddie was over the far side of the room.
But that was not the point that really struck me. It was rather a phenomenon that I have noticed before about dreams: that one is in a scenario where something needs explaining (here, Elton greeting me as a friend) and there is an immediate in-fill of backstory which is experienced in the dream as authentic recall. Our brains (i.e., we) are able to make up stuff, and present it to us, and convince us that it is what we have previously experienced: here regular jovial exchanges with Elton on a non-existent radio show. In the waking world (where I am well aware that I do not move in those kinds of circles) I immediately saw through this, but in the context of the dream I simply accepted the false memory as being a genuine, recalled, experience.
So, what is to say something similar is not happening regularly in my waking life?
Almost a century ago, the experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett (1932/1995) concluded from his empirical studies on memory that the three phenomena we consider separately as perceiving, remembering, and imagining, were not so discrete and separate at all.
Perception, imagination, and memory are generally considered separate mental faculties – but are probably not as distinct as we tend to think
What we think we see or hear is strongly framed by (memory of) previous experiences. What we can imagine is resourced by (memory traces of) what we have experienced – what we have seen and heard in the past. What we think we remember is often fragmentary data filled-out with imaginary components that seem (on the basis of our general experience of the world, i.e., a kind of memory) feasible. What we remember may be based on what we have experienced, or what we have previously imagined we have experienced, or even what has been suggested to us in the past as something we have experienced. The memory that seems so genuine and convincing may be filled-in by guesswork, and may indeed be a memory of something other than a real experience.
Probably, we all live with false memories that we never have reason to question and discard. (Perhaps some of them even do a great deal of good work in supporting our self-esteem and self-worth? Or, perhaps, the opposite?)
Based on past experience, at least as I remember it(!), the Elton dream was atypical, as it involved a real person rather than the usual rolling cast of fictional characters. (But see notes 2 and 4) Perhaps that is just as well, as we are less likely to misconstrue recollections of dreams involving imaginary people in imaginary places as being memories from our waking lives. So, I probably will not meet any stars in my dreams tonight. However, just in case, I wonder if Kate Bush is free?
See you in my dreams?
Work cited:
Bartlett, F. C. (1932/1995) Remembering. A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.
Goodman, G. S., Gonzalves, L., & Wolpe, S. (2019). False memories and true memories of childhood trauma: Balancing the risks. Clinical Psychological Science, 7(1), 29-31.
Kuhn, T. S. (1984/1887) Afterword: Revisiting Planck, in Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. With a new afterword (pp.349-370). The University of Chicago Press.
Luria, A. R. (1987).The Mind of a Mnemonist: a little book about a vast memory.Harvard University Press.
Otgaar, H., Howe, M. L., & Patihis, L. (2022). What science tells us about false and repressed memories. Memory, 30(1), 16-21.
Schacter, D. L. (Ed.). (1995). Memory Distortion. How minds, brains, and societies reconstruct the past. Harvard University Press.
1 This question vexes me when I also consider that I believe that, in a sense, I do not directly interact any other real people. By that, I mean, that although I seem to be, say, talking to a person in the external world, I only have direct experience of a simulation of them constructed in my brain based on sensory data and past experience. We all (I assume?) have mental conversations with people we know well when they are not present: we think we know what they would say in a situation: how they would react; what they might suggest. When they are [actually, physically] present we are surely engaging the same simulation, just with a modest drip feed of sensory data blending in.
(Does that sound strange? I think it would be more strange that if you have been married for 20 years you would assume that you base your interaction with a spouse primarily on transient and likely incomplete immediate sensory data rather than the detailed mental simulation of them that you have incrementally and iteratively built up over hundred of hours of past experience.)
If I call upon those simulations deliberately when asking myself "what would X think about this?", why not in my dreams? (Perhaps, I suggest above, as realistic dreams that are remembered would too readily be confused with waking experience.)
If my simulation argument seems unconvincing, ask yourself why you feel you are engaging with the same person
when you meet them under different conditions (lighting, background noise);
when you only see a two-dimensional image on a small flat screen; or even
when you only have a low quality reproduction of their voice coming from a tiny speaker?
It is not because the sensory data matches well in these different situations.
2 This is my note of my dream involving cricketer Joe Root
I awoke 3 from a dream where I'd been watching sport – football, and switched to cricket [at this point I seem to be watching television], there was a run out call. English bowler, never seen before, seemed to hesitate as he picked up the ball, but direct hit on wicket – awaiting replays to see if it was a run out.
Joe Root was watching next to me on the grass (this was just after it had been announced he was standing down as test team captain) but seemed fidgety – he was moving about and taking up yoga-like positions. [Note, I am now actually at the cricket match, not watching TV.]
There were two young women, girls really, wearing Summer gear (shorts, top tied up high so bare stomach area). They were exchanging glances, and edging closer to Joe. Eventually he did some kind of flip, and landed on one of the girls who had moved up close behind him.
Giggles.
I joked that this was a litigation issue and he might be sued for millions.
Report of a dream [this is a purely imaginary account and in no way reflects any real (waking!) event involving Joe Root that I am aware of!]
Why Joe Root? Just because he had been mentioned in the news? Perhaps. However Root was involved in two of my own alternative conceptions (we have them in all areas of knowledge, not just science), and in both cases I had sensed there was something I was missing in the particular situation – so, perhaps it might be said I felt some 'cognitive dissonance' until I realised my misunderstandings.
One of these misconceptions concerned advertising for pet insurance* that often featured Root alongside a dog, by a company who sponsored some of the cricket highlights on television. It struck me as odd that this company could afford to air so many adverts employing a leading sportsman when I could not imagine the market for pet insurance was especially lucrative. It eventually dawned on me (many months later) that the company were advertising insurance for people – not pets. Perhaps the dog was meant to represent health (rather than, as I had assumed, a creature likely to soon need veterinary attention). [* Note, my clear memories of regularly seeing advertisements for pet insurance turned out to be unreliable as I had misconstrued the sensory data that became represented in memory.]
The other misconception concerned the regular occurrence of booing of Root on the cricket field. Generally cricket crowds do not boo – although fast bowler Stuart Broad had incurred the wrath of Australian supporters who had taken to booing him. But Root, an English international cricketer, seemed to get booed at English grounds whenever he went out to bat, or when he hit a boundary, even though I was not aware of anything he had done or said likely to offend. And, indeed, from after-match interviews I had seen, I thought he did not seem like a person who would offend a large proportion of spectators. Indeed, he was always polite, and sensible, and modest. Again, it took quite a while before I realised that what I was hearing as "bo:o" was actually the crowd calling out an extended "ro:ot".
3 Actually, this is part of a longer account I noted down because it involved a dream within a dream. The account continues:
I woke up, and went downstairs, and went to the table I use as a desk at the front of the house. Looking out I saw the house opposite [which should have been obscured by my garden hedge] had no door and looked like they were having workers in to put in a new door. Then I realised that the house as a whole (which was much larger than usual, and all red brick [unlike the actual house opposite]) was not finished, and looking around I realised that none of the houses in the street were finished yet. I noticed there was no computer on my desk. I went to look out of the back of the house and saw rolling hills and countryside – it look like the West Country around Bristol. I realised I must still be asleep, and found some paper to write down the dream so I could have a record when I really wake (!). Found a pen but it did not seem to work very well.
So, if I can wake up from one dream within another dream, perhaps I am not actually awake now?
4 I have a note of the guitarist/composer Steve Hackett appearing in one dream that was part of a sequence of scenes I recalled when I awoke,
2. Hackett was in an office with charts/manuscripts for music he intended to play for a concert, and in discussion over whether to bring in a second guitarist to play some parts. A person advising – 'manager'(?) of the venue – was going to play some of the music there in the office.
I am not sure what triggered that, although the previous scene that I recalled was unusual (for me) in that it was an auditory dream5:
listening to the first Genesis album ('From Genesis to Revelation') and noticing atmospheric instrumental passages with subtle electric guitar parts I'd never noticed before
I had not noticed these passages before, because – of course- they are not actually on the album! Steve Hackett did not join Genesis till after that album, but perhaps my sleeping brain was thinking that these were contributions he might have made if he had been in the band then?
5 Again, it seems odd that as much of my waking life is accompanied by music, I seldom dream of music. Indeed the first time I recall this happening I was so struck by the dream that I still recall the occasion over 40 years later. I was about 17 and I had fallen asleep one Sunday afternoon, after a having been up late the night before as someone in the sixth form had had a party. (No, Elton was not there – at least, as far as I recall!) I dreamed what seemed to me at the time a very vivid and detailed rendition of 'Shine on you crazy diamond' by Pink Floyd.
Of course, that is just my recollecti0n of my subjective experience on waking from sleep (that is, the waking memory of the dream) – but the music had (at least) seemed so real and intense and deep that, all these years later, I still remember the effect such a detailed dream had on me when I awoke.
Adrian was a participant in the Understanding Science Project. When I spoke to him during the his first year (Y12) of his 'A level' course he told me he had been studying quantum theory, and I asked him about the name 'quantum theory'. He suggested that a theory is an idea that can be proven, but struggled to suggest any other scientific theories.
What about the theory of evolution? Would you count that as a theory?
Yes, but I am not familiar with it. Was it e=mc²?
That's relativity.
Relativity.
I was thinking evolution?
I don't know that one.
Not sure about evolution at all?
No.
Of course there is more than one theory of evolution, but natural selection was a compulsory topic in the school curriculum, and widely referred to as 'the theory of evolution'. Adrian, however, seemed to have no recollection of hearing about evolution at all. It is inconceivable that he had not met the term in school or elsewhere, but it was not something he was bringing to mind in response to my questioning.
