Right . But that should only apply to my dream state . I can ' t force myself to facilitate recall of a dream fragment I remember for a minute or so after waking up . Whatever process causes me to forgetitnotrecallit is more powerful than my conscious mind . Yes , I thought you were making an analogy to computer file storage . There is a huge difference between forgetting something and never bothering to store it where you can retrieve it in the first place . I hear you say something but am not really paying attention . You call me on it and at that point I can still pull out what you just said , even though you were actually correct that I wasn ' t paying attention . But a few minutes later I wouldn ' t have had access to it because I never bothered to process it . It never got past my short term buffer .