4-20 memory stays in our untapped storage

i woke up this morning fresh from dreaming. In my dream, i was talking to this girl (whom in reality i have awkward feelings about and have a weird history with) who was trying to say something in Chinese and having me figure out if i can tell the difference between two Chinese dialect. In this dream, we were reading off a paper with chinese words and a few ping ying. Anyways, she started reading words and some of these were really really hard ones. Not your every day words. My puzzlement when i woke up was, how was i able to know this in my dream. I mean i know in my life i have heard these words before, but i can't say it back to you now for the love of god, because I believe i didn't retain it. But now i'm questioning, do you think that in our mind, everything we've come in contact with in life stays in our memory, but a lot of it is just stored up in a space where it's untapped because it's so hard to get to. But in your dreams, somehow, that untapped space is opened up and used??? OR the other alternative, is possibly, dreams are such a mystery in its content that what I thought was real, like what i thought was the correct saying of the word wasn't really in my dream, but my mind just told me it was. That my mind made me believe something else was happening.

Personally I like to believe my first theory. how great is that, it gives me hope that i actually own all my memories/knowledge, that it's not lost. But just untapped. but somehow I might be able to train myself to tap into that storage space inside my head because in the end, it's there.

Ofcourse, in my dream i also do remember that when this girl told me "i'm (something that idon't remember, i think some sort of Chinese nationality), oppose to what your dad might of told you." Now this girl i know in reality does NOT know my dad and when she was telling me this, i know whom she was actually referring to from a feeling i had in my (heart?)/(gut?) and it was this one guy that's our 2 degrees of separation and reason for why she was probably in my dream. But in the end, i do remember that she said "dad". Now why would my mind dream such a contortion?

I guess that show my memory is not as reliable in my dream when it can make absolute nonsense at the same time.