Is it possible to dream something you have forgotten? If it is possible how?

Question

Yesterday night I dreamed that I was 6 years old and(I am 11 turning 12 now) that I was playing with my stuffed bunny thing. It was just a long circle with a huge head, long floppy ears, and 5 stubs for hands and a tail. Its eyes were whatever sticker I found. I left it in the backyard inside a hole in a tree trunk then covered it up with the branches and leaves then filled the whole up with dirt. I think I was keeping him safe from my brother or something. I also lost my rabbit when I was 6 and looked for it for a long time. Today I looked for leaves covering a hole my yard and It was in there. But the tree in my dream was HUGE and the leaves were reddish and creepy looking. Is it possible that I dreamed something I forgot?

Answer 1

What you forget consciously, might remain in subconscious memory.

Dreams tend to tap the subconsious.

If you found it in real life, sounds like your dream could have been a memory.

Answer 2

The tree in your dream was huge because you were a munchkin when you did it! ;-)

Forgetting something doesn't mean the memory is gone from you; it just means you have lost the link to the memory.  It's like writing all of your memories in a diary, and then someone rips out a page and moves it to the end.  When you go to look for the page, it won't be there.  (Interestingly enough, elephants never forget anything...many decades after meeting someone for a couple of days, an elephant will recognize the person at first glance).

Also, vision uses 70% of your brain.  It also collects images and stores them to be used to help you see in the future.  There was this guy who was blinded at 3 years old (chemical damage to his eyes), so he didn't have enough time to build up his vision's image library.  After several decades, they repaired his eye, but he couldn't really see because his brain had no idea what he was looking at.  The image library is also used while you sleep so you can dream.

So, I think you happened to access a visual memory (dreams allow people to organize their thoughts of the day, maybe you saw a tree earlier today that looked similar to how it looked when you were young).