What attempting to write down or recount a dream feels like, to me, is confabulation. I am telling a story, but I know—as I am telling it—that I’m making it up. The details were different. It was all different—stranger—more disjointed—less coherent—but I can’t remember any of that; it’s fleeing my mind from the very first moment I try to recall it, the moment I wake; all I can do is try to fill in the details with guesses, cliches, etc. But it’s wrong; it’s much more mundane than the “actual dream” (if there was such a thing). (Indeed—as Dennett also points out in his essay—it often seems like trying to recall the dream makes the memory of it flee faster.)
This is my experience as well. I actually wrote most of the following paragraph before reading your comment, in response to alkjash’s comment above:
My own experience with recounting my dreams afterwards is that often, they include elements which somehow seem to make sense within the dream but afterwards turn out to be incoherent. In order to construct even a half-way coherent narrative—that is, not one that sounds like it could have actually happened, but one which could even be understood—I often need to simplify things and explain it in a way which isn’t quite what happened in the dream, but rather the closest approximation of something coherent that I can construct out of the incomplete skeleton that the dream gave me.
This is my experience as well. I actually wrote most of the following paragraph before reading your comment, in response to alkjash’s comment above:
My own experience with recounting my dreams afterwards is that often, they include elements which somehow seem to make sense within the dream but afterwards turn out to be incoherent. In order to construct even a half-way coherent narrative—that is, not one that sounds like it could have actually happened, but one which could even be understood—I often need to simplify things and explain it in a way which isn’t quite what happened in the dream, but rather the closest approximation of something coherent that I can construct out of the incomplete skeleton that the dream gave me.