I can recall with perfect clarity the dream where I was teaching calculus to a classroom full of cats wearing tiny graduation caps, but I cannot remember what my son told me about his day at school yesterday. My mind has become a curator of the meaningless and an enemy of the meaningful, carefully preserving nonsense while allowing significance to evaporate like morning mist.
The brain appears to run on backwards logic when it comes to memory storage. The conversation where my friend revealed their deepest fear has vanished without a trace, but the absurd dream sequence involving a talking refrigerator and a bicycle made of cheese remains archived in perfect detail three months later. Important phone calls disappear, but the dream where I was late for an exam I never signed up for resurfaces with documentary precision.
Maybe this is because dreams come pre-wrapped in strangeness, making them inherently memorable through their violation of normal logic. A purple elephant riding a unicycle through my childhood home sticks in memory precisely because it contradicts everything I know about elephants, unicycles, and my childhood home. The bizarre becomes unforgettable while the meaningful becomes forgettable.
But conversations, no matter how important, arrive dressed in the familiar clothes of ordinary language, spoken in familiar voices, taking place in familiar settings. Their significance hides beneath the surface of normalcy, making them vulnerable to the mind’s tendency to discard what seems routine even when it isn’t routine at all.
There’s also this: dreams make no demands on us to respond, to remember, to act upon what we’ve experienced. They’re pure reception without responsibility. But conversations come with obligations—to remember what was said, to follow up, to let the exchange change us in some way. Maybe we forget important conversations because remembering them would require us to be different, while dreams can be remembered safely because they require nothing from us except the entertainment of recollection.
The archive of irrelevance grows daily while the library of meaning shrinks, leaving us rich in surreal imagery but poor in the actual substance of our relationships and experiences.
Tonight I want to practice treating waking conversations with the same attention I unconsciously give to sleeping fantasies, to honor the meaningful with the same careful storage I reserve for the meaningless.
