Occasionally after I wake up in the morning and go back to sleep, I'll have an extremely vivid dream where I'm aware that I'm dreaming. Today, I watched several dozen people eat in a cafeteria. Every face was a new person: horn-rimmed glasses, a thin, brown mustache, a chin that curved outward like the moon. Every face was a stranger.
How does the mind conjure these faces? Do we secretly have near-photographic memories that absorb every new face in the mall, flag the details as trivial, and then dump them into a trashbin only accessible when we're dreaming and our mind needs to generate a crowd in a flash? Or can we generate faces at will, picking and choosing features from people we do know and assembling them into a new composite? Like if you want to generate a vaguely menacing old man, you'll pick the wrinkled brow from your grandpa, the narrow eyebrows of your physics teacher, and the jowl of Captain Kangaroo when he zones out and has a flashback to his days at Vietnam?
"Captain! I can't move! I can't make it over the minefield!"
"I won't leave you behind, soldier. Grab on. We'll jump over the mines together."
No comments:
Post a Comment