Had a very vivid dream. The content of the dream is evading me. But the dream content was comparatively recent, from within the last decade.

I believe the content concerned a bicycle trip taken between 2000 and 2005. The awareness of the dream was clear and precise on waking but has since been fading while I searched for a means of recording the memory.

After the accident I would have similar vivid dreams on a regular basis.
The appearance of this latest one reminds me of how they once were a frequent occurrence. They have been infrequent lately.

The dream content would typically reflect events in my childhood, my youth, or my teens. None of the remembered ones contained recent content, i.e. content originating from the last decade.

So there was once a regular series of these vivid dreams, a sequence which appears to have been interrupted, or slowed. Each one involved events from deep in my past.

This most recent one represents an outlier, the tail end of the sequence. It contained content that was much more recent than any of the prior dreams with similar vivid content.

I think it possible that these vivid dreams may have something to do with the brain operating to reorganize access to stored mental data. It is likely the injury resulted in corrupt mental data. The bits are all there, but they are corrupt and unintelligible. To continue with the computer analogy, there exists software you can run against corrupt data. The software will search the disk, locate lost data chains, and will work to rebuild those data chains, and reconstruct the corrupt, or lost data.

It is possible the brain performs a similar function. If that is the case, then my reconstruction commenced with my earliest memory store which, for an unknown reason, was less corrupt, or more accessible, than more recent memory stores. This rebuilding process resulted in giving me unconscious access to vivid scenes and events from my youth, events of which I had no conscious memory, events that I had to puzzle over in order to correctly place them in the chronological record, or properly identify the place and time of the original event.

That it is possible my brain is now attempting to reorganize and reconstruct much more recent memory stores. Memory stores that may have suffered a greater degree of corruption than my older memory stores. Because of this greater degree of corruption, it has taken longer for the brain to complete the data recovery process. As the brain completes this process of data recovery, one immediate outcome of the process is that it provides access to prior memories. This recovered memory results in the vivid dream state reconstruction.

Update

Searched for a prior post on the same topic. Finally found it: Brain Injury Impacts. What is interesting is that the prior post describes vivid flashbacks occurring during daily awake routine and not as a remembered element of a dream state. I had completely forgotten about this phenomena. Suspect both the vivid awake memory events, and the vivid dream content events, are derived from the same mental phenomena.