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gwern comments on Dreams with Damaged Priors - Less Wrong
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I've heard it said somewhere (sorry, can't come up with a citation) that this is the rationale behind the brain's tendency to actively erase dreams, the bane of dream-diary keepers everywhere. Because we're somewhat source-blind, we risk keeping our attachment to conclusions we made in dreams even after we realize we were dreaming. To prevent that, the brain erases most of the five or so dreams we have each night, and even the ones we remember on waking tend to be mostly erased in a few hours unless you consciously think about them very hard.
Yes, and thank god! I not too infrequently have false memories from dreams, because my dreams are so humdrum. So far it hasn't caused me any irreparable damage, but I live in dread that someday I'll dream about filing my taxes or something and never get around to doing it in real-life.
(One strange dream anecdote: a few days ago I was reading the Wiktionary entry for spannungsbogen - a good word for LWers to know, incidentally - and I was annoyed at the talk page's skepticism. So I went to the New York Times and looked it up, finding one article defining the term, and adding it to the talk page as an example from somewhere other than Dune.
A few hours later, I abruptly realize that I never actually did any of that inasmuch as I was sound asleep at the time. For the heck of it, I go to nytimes.com & run the search. I find one article defining the term, and add it to the talk page as an example from somewhere other than Dune...)