WE FORGET almost all dreams soon after waking up. Our forgetfulness is generally attributed to neurochemical conditions in the brain that occur during REM sleep, a phase of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements and dreaming.
“Since dreams are thought to primarily occur during REM sleep, the sleep stage when the MCH cells turn on, activation of these cells may prevent the content of a dream from being stored in the hippocampus – consequently, the dream is quickly forgotten.”
Is not remembering dreams a sign that you're unhealthy? This question might get different answers depending on who you ask, but the short answer (and clinically speaking) is no. "It is a myth that remembering dreams is a sign of good or bad night's sleep," sleep researcher and co-author of Sleep for Success!
Remembering your dreams doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how restful your sleep is, Dr. Harris says. Instead, recalling those dreams is a lot more likely to depend on a number of factors, from your current level of stress to the medication you're taking.
Yes, depressed people tend to dream more. In fact, one study found that people who are depressed can dream up to three times more than people who are not depressed.
Belicki (3) found in the laboratory that wakening people up in the REM sleep phase reveals that about 80% of them remember dreams, but in clinical practice young adults remember dreams upon awakening once or twice a week.
According to a poll done by CBS, 4 out of 10 adults under 30 say that they can remember their dreams the majority of the time. That is less than half of the young adults in the U.S. Younger people have better memory function than older adults, which is why forgetting dreams may scare some people.
Sometimes the dreams we have seem so real. Most of the emotions, sensations, and images we feel and visualize are those that we can say we have seen or experienced in real life. This is because the same parts of the brain that are active when we are awake are also active when we are in certain stages of our sleep.
Our brain is not fully developed when we are born—it continues to grow and change during this important period of our lives. And, as our brain develops, so does our memory.
Dreams may be so hard to remember because the hippocampus, a structure in the brain responsible for learning and memory processes, is not fully active when we wake up. This could result in a dream being present in our short-term memory, but not yet able to move to long-term storage.
1. Sleep disruptions: Vivid dreams that linger with you or feel indistinguishable from real life may be the result of fragmented sleep. Waking during a period of REM sleep rather than at the end of a sleep cycle can cause you to remember your dreams more vividly.
The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20–30 minutes. People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase.
The good news is that it's completely normal not to remember much of your early years. It's known as infantile amnesia. This means that even though kids' brains are like little sponges, soaking in all that info and experience, you might take relatively few memories of it into adulthood.
Although some theorists have suggested that pain sensations cannot be part of the dreaming world, research has shown that pain sensations occur in about 1% of the dreams in healthy persons and in about 30% of patients with acute, severe pain.
Dreaming is a normal part of healthy sleep. Good sleep has been connected to better cognitive function and emotional health, and studies have also linked dreams to effective thinking, memory, and emotional processing.
"Dreams are often about identity, because we're figuring out who we are and what we need, and the beliefs and perspectives we hold," says Wallace. "If you feel unfulfilled, undervalued or not the person you want to be in waking life, your dreams will often reflect that.
As dreams are all about the self—your feelings and behaviors—if you're dreaming about a specific person in your life, then it's likely there's some aspect of them that is currently at work in your life, Loewenberg explains. Perhaps you both share a behavioral trait that is currently being activated.
You could be one of the few people who, in fact, do not dream. The reason, Dr. Tal says, is because their REM sleep is interrupted by a substance (such as alcohol or marijuana), medications (like antidepressants), or a mental health condition like depression.
If you dream about a 'random' person – someone whom you haven't thought of for months – then it's possible that they're missing you. And yes, they're communicating it to you through your dreams. You shouldn't be dreaming of them in the first place. After all, those who we think of the most usually invade our dreams.
Dreaming sleep is a deep stage of sleep with intense brain activity in the forebrain and midbrain. It is characterized by the ability of dreams to occur, along with the absence of motor function with the exception of the eye muscles and the diaphragm.
When you enter REM sleep, brain activity increases again, meaning sleep is not as deep. The activity levels are like when you're awake. That's why REM sleep is the stage where you'll have intense dreams.