RE: I rarely remember what I dreamed during night
March 19, 2019 at 10:57 pm
(This post was last modified: March 19, 2019 at 11:03 pm by Alan V.)
(March 19, 2019 at 6:16 am)Der/die AtheistIn Wrote: Usually when I wake up I have no memories of what I've dreamed. Sometimes I know what is happening in a dream right before waking up, and after I wake up I completely forget the dream. My sleep is pretty deep, is it because of that?
Actually all REM sleep, when dreaming is most common, is at the same level of sleep. Deeper sleep is usually dreamless. However, it is certainly true that some people naturally remember their dreams better than others, but it may have more to do with when in the sleep cycle they typically wake up. That would be my guess anyway.
If you wake right after a dreaming period, and make a special effort right after you wake up, you can usually remember bits of your last dream, usually the end of the dream. The part of the brain that processes information into memories is typically turned off during sleep and dreaming, which is why insomnia of dreaming is natural. That's why it takes the extra effort after you wake up, when your brain is reengaged and you can process memories again. It's a skill which can usually be improved with practice.
Many dream events are so discontinuous with how the waking world works that memories of them are more difficult to process. We usually don't have the necessary categories for processing the discontinuities, confabulations, vague events, irrationalities, and so on. For this reason, we often add bits to the dreams we remember, or delete bits from them, to make them seem more like waking, to smooth over such problems. That adds inaccuracies while making memories easier to process. However, when you understand that dreaming is its own unique kind of experience, you can avoid many of such translation errors. Again, practice usually helps.
But one of the primary barriers to remembering dreams is that we are so tired when they happen, or right after we wake up, that we can't be bothered. We need a motivating interest in their details, and their usual nonsense doesn't provide much tangible motivation.
