Vivid dreams are potential abduction experiences. As a society we may stubbornly assume the role of the French astronomers and tell abductees that they are not remembering experience, that their memories are 'false' or have been implanted by hypnotists predisposed to the alien hypothesis. But the abductees, and their memories, do not go away. A conceptualisation of memory that is capable of dealing with alien abduction phenomena should begin by observing that the memorial is intimately linked with the imaginative. Experience then, upon which we rely totally to formulate reality, is not possible without memory and imagination.
Reality does influence imagination, and vice versa.
But imagination is more powerful at the end of the day, since it is always imagination that changes reality. Put simply, discovery is invention. It only became possible to imagine that the earth orbits the sun, as opposed to the sun orbiting the earth, because of changes that occurred within the culture. Knowledge, despite its claims of universality, is always cultural. The experiences that produce knowledge are always never more than what a culture will allow, can allow.