Question: why are our dreams so unrelated to our real life memories?

Ben Kenward answered on 22 Jun 2017:

For sure all kinds of stuff happens in dreams that never happens for real, but if you think about it most of it is related in some way to reality. Dreams are a bit like a kind of random cut and paste of different things that have happened or we think could happen. So in a sense that makes them unrelated to real memories, in that most things in dreams haven’t actually happened, but actually in an important sense dreams really are related to real life memories, which do inspire them.