We were having dinner.
Not the quiet kind — the real kind. Plates everywhere, voices overlapping, laughter interrupting laughter. I was sitting with my cousins in the Philippines, surrounded by the familiar chaos that only family can create. Someone was teasing someone else. Someone laughed so hard they almost choked. Everyone was happy not in a dramatic way, just effortlessly, naturally happy.
The table was impossible. There were at least ten different Filipino dishes, maybe more — no one was counting. Rice everywhere. Serving spoons colliding. Someone insisting I had to try this one, while someone else was already putting more food on my plate. It looked like the entire hometown had been invited to eat, just in case anyone might still be hungry.
And of course, no one was hungry — but everyone kept eating.
Food was being passed, discussed, defended. Someone loudly claimed one dish was better than last time. Someone else took that personally. Laughter erupted again. Plates were refilled without permission. Refusing food was clearly not an option.
This wasn’t just dinner. It was a communal event. A celebration. A small, joyful chaos held together by food, noise, and belonging. It felt full — not just the table, but the room. Full of voices, memories, familiarity. The kind of fullness that doesn’t ask for anything more.
And then suddenly —-
I was gone.
No warning. No gentle fade. No slow waking. One moment I was reaching for another dish, surrounded by noise and warmth and the next it felt like I fell straight through a hole in reality. The table vanished. The laughter cut off mid-air. The Philippines disappeared.
I opened my eyes.
Silence.
I was in my bedroom in Denmark. Cold, quiet, painfully empty by comparison. Just me, my bed, and a ceiling that clearly had no interest in feeding me or making me laugh. My body was here — fully present — but my mind was still somewhere between dishes and cousins.
For a few seconds, I genuinely couldn’t understand what had happened. It felt less like waking up and more like being ejected, as if someone had grabbed me mid-dream and dropped me back into real life without explanation. This is not where I was five seconds ago.
Reality arrived slowly — the room, the light, the awareness — but the feeling refused to follow. My emotions were still seated at the table, still warm, still full. And that’s when I realized my brain hadn’t just shown me a dream. It had shown me a memory — edited, amplified, and polished.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, trying to mentally rewind. Could I go back if I closed my eyes again? If I didn’t move? No. The Philippines were gone. The dinner was over. The cousins had vanished. Reality had locked the door behind me.
What bothered me wasn’t that I missed the food — although, yes, that too — but how real it had felt. My body had believed it. My emotions had accepted it as truth. For a brief moment, my brain had convinced me that this was my present life.
And then it hit me.
I’ve done this before — not just in dreams, but in memory.
Lying there in my bed in Denmark, still half lost between two worlds, I realized something slightly embarrassing: my brain had done it again. It does this a lot. It zooms in on moments of warmth, laughter, and belonging and then, like a very selective editor, quietly removes everything else. The tiredness. The long days. The corrupt government in the Philippines. The floods. The power cuts. The stress. The parts of life that don’t fit neatly into a beautiful dinner scene.
Delete. Cut. Fade out.
What remains is perfection — not factual perfection, but emotional perfection. A version of the past where everyone is laughing, the food never runs out, and nothing bad ever makes it to the table. This is memory bias.
Memory Bias
From a psychological perspective, memory bias describes the way our minds systematically distort the past, remembering some aspects more vividly or more positively than others. Memory is not a recording device. It is reconstructive. Each time we remember something, we rebuild it, influenced by emotion, meaning, and our current state of mind. Research going back to Frederic Bartlett shows that memory prioritizes coherence and emotional relevance over accuracy. In other words, we remember what felt meaningful, not what was complete.
One common form of this is known as rosy retrospection — our tendency to remember past experiences as better than they actually were. Neuroscience supports this: emotional memories are shaped by the interaction between the hippocampus and the amygdala, meaning emotionally rewarding elements are stored more strongly, while stress and discomfort often fade. From the brain’s perspective, this makes sense. Why store bureaucracy, broken systems, and natural disasters when it can store joy? Why remember exhaustion when it can remember connection? The mind isn’t trying to produce an accurate documentary. It’s trying to keep us functional.
But this beautiful edit comes with a cost.
When you wake up abruptly in a quiet bedroom in Denmark, the contrast can be brutal. Reality suddenly feels flat, less colorful, slightly under-seasoned. For a moment, you wonder if you left something important behind. But what you left behind wasn’t a place. It was a feeling.
This is why memory bias matters so much in real life, especially during healing. When we try to move on — from a place, a relationship, or a former version of ourselves — memory bias resists. It replays the best scenes and withholds the full context. The warmth stays; the reasons we had to leave quietly disappear. Healing then feels confusing and slow, like waking up in the wrong country, knowing you’re awake but feeling emotionally displaced.
Understanding this doesn’t ruin the memory. It softens it. I can let my brain replay the laughter without believing that everything was perfect or that my present life is lacking. I can appreciate the edit without moving into it. Because memory bias isn’t about lying to us — it’s about reminding us what we value most.
And healing, perhaps, is learning to wake up fully — emotionally — and live without the filter.
References
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Levine, L. J., & Safer, M. A. (2002). Sources of bias in memory for emotions.
