Why dont you remember all your dreams?
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Science can offer hints for why dreams can be so hard to hold onto.Credit: DepositPhotos ShareSome mornings, waking up might feel like interrupting a vivid alternate universe. You open your eyes to reality, but the dream you were having still lingers clearly in your memory, complete with characters and plot points. Other days, waking up may be more akin to emerging from a black void with nothing to report.Even if you rarely recall details of your dreams, chances are youre still having them. Research indicates that nearly everyone dreams regularlyeven those who claim they never do. If you bring those same people into the sleep laboratory and wake them up during an active stage of sleep and ask what they were thinking, they will remember something, says Erin Wamsley, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Furman University, where she studies sleep and dreaming. In sleep lab conditions, where everyone is forced to immediately reflect on dreams, most people remember at least one dream in a night, she tells Popular Science. (The one exception seems to be people who lose the ability to dream, as a result of brain damage or disease in specific regions, and this comes with other profound effects.)Dreaming is a relative constant, its just memory that varies. There is no single answer for why, and lots about dreaming remains unresolved. But science can offer hints for why dreams can be so hard to hold onto.First, dream memory is generally short lived. Sleep studies show its rare to remember a dream if you dont awake during or immediately after it, and then stop to consider what you experienced, says Wamsley. We recall our dreams best when we pay attention to them while conscious, she explains, otherwise they fade away. Thats potentially because of differences in neurotransmitter activity that occur when were conked out. Waking during the night is associated with better dream memory, and its actually quite normal to stir for a few seconds at a time and shift positions, Wamsley says. Be warned though, past a certain threshold, frequent waking translates into lower quality sleep. Poor sleep is often associated with high dream recallHaving a few arousals is normal and healthy. Having a really large number is often part of a sleep disorder.On its own, waking up is important for dream memory. However, when and how you wake up also matters. Sleep phase, timing, and alarms all play a role.Sleep occurs in four distinct stages: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and then three types of non-REM (NREM) sleep which repeat in a cycle throughout the night. NREM 1 sleep is the lightest stage and the first you fall into from wakingit only lasts a few minutes at a time. Then, during stage 2 NREM sleep, your brain waves slow and electrical activity comes in short bursts. Nearly half of adult sleep time is spent here, and from this stage your brain can transition to either NREM 3 or REM sleep. In phase 3 NREM sleep, also known as deep sleep, your brain waves slow even further and stay more consistent. This type of sleep occurs relatively early in the night, is critical for high quality rest, and makes up about a quarter of our sleeping time. Finally, in REM sleep, neural activity resembles the waking brain. Your eyes move rapidly beneath your lids (hence the name), and you spend about a quarter of the night in this phase.You may have heard that REM sleep is when dreams happen. And its true that many of our most vivid, most story-like, and longest dreams tend to occur during this phase, says Wamsley. However, she notes that dreaming can occur in every stage of sleep, and people do sometimes report intense, narrative dreams when woken from non-REM stages. Yet the odds of remembering such detailed dreams are highest waking up from REM, she says. There is about an 80% chance of remembering a dream waking up from rapid eye movement sleep and about a 50% chance waking up from other sleep stages.Another factor is the time of night. The closer you are in your routine to waking up for the day, the more active your brain state becomes. For many people, morning dreams can be especially vivid and memorable, says Wamsley. We experience a greater amount of brain activity and lighter and more active sleep because our internal biological rhythm gives us this activation cue to become alert.But a common wake-up method can counteract that trend. If you wake up to an alarm each morning youre going to be less likely to remember a dream, says Jing Zhang, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she studies sleep and memory. In part, thats because alarms can stir us from deep sleep, when dream recall is lower, as opposed to allowing us to naturally come out of a lighter sleep phase, agrees Wamsley. Plus, Zhang explains that alarms can spike cortisol levels, jarring someone out of sleep and drawing their attention immediately to the demands of the day, as opposed to letting them wake more slowly and mull over any dreams.If youre trying to get a better grasp on your dreams, forgoing the alarm for a few days can be a simple way to up your recall. Practicing waking up and asking yourself what you just dreamed is another strategy. Just like any memory task, if you practice it, you can get better at it, Zhang tells Popular Science.Other variables influencing dream memory are less easily controlled. The relative content and intensity of our dreams is a big part of why some dreams prove much more memorable than others. Emotional memories in waking life are more likely to be remembered for longer, and so are emotional dreams, says Zhang. Personality may also play a role, she notes. Across studies researchers have found that higher levels of opennessas classified on the Big Five personality testis correlated with increased dream recall. Finally, variation in brain structure and function seems to predispose certain people to more readily remember dreams than others.Studying dreams is difficult as theres no definitive test or scan to show if someone is dreaming in real-time, says Zhang. Instead, scientists have to rely on peoples own recall. Despite the challenge, research has begun to show that dreams and memory are intertwined. Whether or not you remember a dream can actually impact your recall and emotional state in waking life, according to research from both Zhang and Wamsley.Sleeping after a learning task, and dreaming about that task is linked to improvement in subsequent task performance and memory, according to a 2010 study led by Wamsley and a 2012 follow-up. Further, participants remembered negative images from an emotional picture task better after a night of sleep, if they reported recalling a dream, according to a 2024 study led by Zhang. The same study also found that emotional state correlated with dream content (positive dreams from the night before were linked with more positive mood the next day), and those that remembered their dreams became less emotionally responsive to neutral stimuli during follow-up tasks.Taken altogether, Zhang interprets these findings to mean that dreaming could play a role in helping the brain to consolidate and prioritize memories. Perhaps, by rehashing aspects of our waking lives, dreams help us sort through and decide what is most important to keep and what we can let fade. I think it can be very valuable for people to pay attention to their dreamsnot necessarily to overanalyze their meaning, but to understand how dreaming is a sign your brain is doing important emotional and cognitive work, Zhang says. By being aware of their dreams, people might notice patterns or emotions that reflect what their mind is working on, which can be helpful for self-reflection.Though dont let that trick you into over-interpreting the dreams your mind metes out. The Freudian idea that dreams align by any common code, which can be used to analyze your subconscious is bullshit, says Wamsley. Theres no evidence that dreams harbor a secret meaning below the surface level, especially not one that you need a professional to tell you about, she adds. The person who is having the dream is the person best-positioned to say what it means. Theres no hidden manual.This story is part of Popular SciencesAsk Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something youve always wanted to know?Ask us.
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