The Twilight Phase

I was driving to work the other day and I thought of the perfect title for a blogging website. But for the life of me, I can’t remember it now. It is surprising how much we know and forget in that twilight phase when we are not fully awake.

Many times I have woken from a dream with every detail vivid in my brain. Then not an hour later, I can barely remember the overarching theme of what the dream was about.

Why is it that dreams are so elusive? They are like a butterfly that is real while we sleep, but as we wake, the butterfly fades into the background. If we reach out and try to catch it, our hands pass right through it, unable to grasp it in the realm of the waking.

Why then, if the details of dreams are so easily forgotten during that twilight phase are we able to go to sleep the next night and have a dream that that we know is the continuation of the one from the previous night?

Conscious thoughts during the twilight phase, like my blog title, also disappear into its depths. Is the twilight phase merely a series of thoughts from our sleepy brain that are quickly forgotten because they are like background music and without significance? What then about my blog idea or those dreams you wake up from and want to relive forever? An hour later, even those details are gone.

Is your mind storing memories in a different part of your brain when you are in this twilight phase; like a hard drive that is only accessible during the night or while sleeping? Do the sleeping parts of our brains know the secrets that our waking brains cannot grasp? When I thought of that blog title, I wasn’t trying to think of one, I was just pondering in general and it came to me- you know suchandsuch would be a great title for a blog!

If our conscious mind could remember all of the things we’ve forgotten during the twilight phases of sleep, I wonder what we would learn.