Women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Hurston’s lines suggest that memory is not a neutral record but a selective, desire-shaped act: people (here, “women,” in a generalized, folkloric register) discard what threatens them and preserve what sustains them. The second claim—“The dream is the truth”—elevates inner life (hopes, fears, visions, private narratives) to the status of reality, because it governs behavior. In other words, what one believes or imagines becomes practically “true” through its consequences: choices, attachments, and risks taken in accordance with that dream. The passage resonates with Hurston’s broader interest in psychology and folk wisdom, where lived reality is continually made and remade by story, belief, and will.