It is a tempting premise because it discounts any factual, scientific and memory errors in the actual story lines.
A few key clues in these theories were the fact that the Others (and Dharma) brain washing facility was known as Room 23. We got two references of this room. First, Walt was taken prisoner there and subjected to the high intensity film images. It seemed the sheriff used it as a punishment tool, for which Walt respected and therefore behaved himself. Second, we got an intense look at it when Ben put Karl in the room. We got the aspect of cult programming in that scene with early reference to "Jacob loves you."
23 was also the Number for Jack, which most believe was the central character of the story. Tying the two elements together, Jack was also subjected to mind control games at Hydra, and possibly at the Barracks (or Room 23 facilities) when he integrated himself in a game a football with Mr. Friendly.
The idea that LOST was a nightmare of Jack's subconscious has some merit. Because in the End of the series, Jack got the one thing that he wanted: a chance to see his father again. And Jack's mind rewarded his imaginary friends with happiness and a sense of belonging (especially with the couples).
But the one other big clue is that Aaron, who was born on the island, was also born later in the End. That can't physically happen. So it must be mental.
Jack's mind could have forgot about certain memories in the course of concluding his dream series.
And science backs up the notion that our brains "over write" memories when recalling other ones.
Forgetting certain memories while remembering others may be a normal part of brain function, new research shows. In
short, the very act of remembering may cause people to forget other
memories that are overridden in the retrieval process, according to the
study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Researchers
from the University of Birmingham and the MRC Cognition and Brain
Sciences unit in Cambridge, England, discovered that intentional memory
recall isn’t as simple as mentally reawakening a memory. In fact, the
act of remembering can actually trigger the brain to forget other
competing experiences that interfere with memory retrieval.
“Though
there has been an emerging belief within the academic field that the
brain has this inhibitory mechanism, I think a lot of people are
surprised to hear that recalling memories has this darker side of making
us forget others by actually suppressing them,” study co-leader Maria
Wimber, PhD, said.
While
there are other studies on memory interference, researchers say this is
the first to isolate the adaptive forgetting mechanism in the brain.
It’s this mechanism by which remembering dynamically alters the aspects
of our past that remain accessible.
Researchers
used MRI scans to monitor patterns of brain activity in study
participants while they were asked to recall certain memories based on
images they had been shown earlier. Over the course of several
retrievals, participants were asked to recall a specific memory, which
became more vivid with each trial. The results showed that competing
memories were retrieved with more difficulty with each trial carried
out.
The
findings are not limited to specific memory types — semantic memory,
episodic memory, and recently acquired short-term memories are all
impacted. In fact, though people differ genetically, researchers say
that it is thought that all brains are capable of inducing varying degrees of this forgetting mechanism.
There
is a bright side to the study. “[Forgetting] can be incredibly useful
when trying to overcome a negative memory from our past. So there are
opportunities for this to be applied in areas to really help people,”
Wimber says.
