Micronight and Macroverse

I was awake til gone 2am last night, just looking at foriegn film sites.
Its amazing how the night is always a universe in itself, either you surf a virtual reality or your mind just makes one up. To me, dreams and the internet are very similar. They are non-linear in nature, yet one path may lead unexpectedly into another. You may re-awake old memories - for example, I happened to be led to a site about a film called Salo - I am sure this is a film that I stumbled across years ago when I happened to have the TV on late at night when I couldn't sleep. Stills from the film suddenly gave me a sense of great Deja Vu, and a feeling of homecoming. I'd had stills and scenes in my mind from a foriegn film that I desperatley tried to track down as it has left such an impact on my psyche and now it looked like I had found the answer completely by accident because I was looking at another film reference. Now, isn't it strange how the mind does this, I think the power of the subconscious is amazing, because it must've picked up cues and clues along the way, been led by attraction and fascination.
There has been a lot in the news about dreams lately. One person on Wikipedia even goes as far as to suggest that we remember 3d films as memories because the mind does not think of them as merely an image but as of reality because our eyes pick up things stereoscopically. Yet how does that explain visions that are as much a part of our experience than anything that has actually happened to us. I still remember the feelings of recoil and pain on viewing the mass rape scene in the Baby of Macon, and the utter revulsion and sympathy of the multimorph creature at the end of The Thing. Just celluloid or video images, and yet they play out in the mind as if they were recollections of real events. It is so strange how sometimes a film can give a child nightmares, like some kind of PTSD, and yet it is a story. However, the growing neurons in the mind can distinguish between a story and an event, surely. Or can they? Do the memories of a story perisist more than the memories of an event?