My biggest problem with the memories that are restored in dreams is trying to ascertain the veracity of those memories. It's problematic, too, because I've usually had no reconnection with those people, places and things from 1999 and back. That means that if I do reconnect I'm almost wholly dependent on another to remember exactly, or close enough, as I do.

Sometimes – most of the time – that works well. As an example: I was in email contact with an old ski buddy and had a couple of dreams about him and I asked him if he remembered the time that we were in Aspen and we were storing our Strohs beer outside on the windowsill in the bedroom. He had an OMG reaction and asked how I could possibly remember that. That was like getting the ball rolling and, together, we 'remembered' almost the entire trip. That's a positive example.

Negative examples work in the same way. Dream, recovered memory but 3 others that were there can't verify it. False memory.

These are just two short examples. They aren't difficult to deal with because I don't have a strong emotional attachment to either memory.

But then there are the dreams that do elicit strong emotional "memories"... so much that they become an important part of my "past." They are part of me and I usually don't have anyone to verify the memory.

My aunt has been helping a lot in helping me determine what's true or not where my parents are involved. That's a mixed blessing, though. It's difficult for me to forget my dad flying me around in helicopters. He didn't, though. He was in the Navy during WWII but he wasn't a naval pilot. But when my aunt told me the truth – that he had never been a pilot and that he was aboard ship during the war – it really hurt because it was a kind of emotional bond that I had with my dad... but it wasn't.

The most unsettling recovered memories are the ones with only one other person involved or, maybe worse, memories of places or things with no others involved. I'm a little groggy and I'm having some immediate memory problems but I'm going to try to finish this. There's something that I want to write that I've never shared previously and it would be good for me to get it out. I hope.

Okay – the memories that come back in dreams that don't include others. These are strange because they may be of a place, for instance, in which I've an emotional attachment. Depending on the strength of that attachment, I will decide if it's important enough to find out if it is a real or false memory.

None of my dreams 'feel' new or original. The people are usually the same although an old/new face may come in for the first time, I'm in one of four locations and there are a handful of themes. So when there is something different – a memory trying to break through – it feels as if some part of my mind wants to act as a mid-wife trying to nudge it along. What usually happens is that the memory will become just another piece of the repetitive themes and then it becomes a memory.

I don't know if I'm making any sense at all.

Let me try one thing. The memories released in dreams that can't be proven. I can have a nighttime breakthrough or the memory may take months to formate. Example: trying to escape the rutting moose in Maine in the snow while I'm on x-country skis. This is a fairly recent recovery. But it's becoming more frequent and detailed and while I haven't checked a few things out, it's plausible. The only thing that would destroy it as plausible is that there would have to have been snowing in early October in a particular spot in NE Maine.

So one day I'll check the earliest snowfall from year to year and find if this is a true or false memory. I don't have much emotional involvement with this repressed memory, though.

The last type of memories from dreams are the ones that have you alone with one other person. Because these dreams can be very intimate and so very crystal clear I'm convinced that all that are in the catalog are true. Except one. And it's had me baffled for 12 years now and the memory is so very, very emotional that I can't accept that the other person doesn't remember it exactly as I do.

The dream/memory is one week after my father died. I'm going back to my home in another state. An old girlfriend had invited me to stop by before leaving town. When I walk into her apartment she speaks a sentence that I can remember word for word, touches me and we make love throughout the night and I tell her, very honestly, that my first orgasm that night was the best of my life.

When I brought it up, 16 years later, she doesn't remember what I recall that she said at the door, my comment about the best orgasm or a number of things as I remember them. She remember a "night of great sex" and that it was probably around the time that my dad died but she recalls me being in town for some reunion.

I was really upset to find that we weren't in sync. It was one of the most emotionally charged nights of my life. I had been overwhelmed by grief for a week and the way that she cared for me and let me know that I was loved made me feel so very joyful. It was like a clip from an x-rated Frank Capra movie.

Those are the ones that hurt the most.

I should go. I don't think that I have done a good job of explaining how I try to distinguish real from fanciful memories that come to me in dreams. For some reason I feel like smoking a cigarette and I don't smoke.

I'll come back when my head is better.

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