Exploring The Reason We Forget Our Dreams When We Wake Up. Every morning, we wake up with a faint glimpse of a forgotten world. Our dreams, vivid and alive just moments before, slip silently into oblivion, leaving us with more questions than answers. Why do our minds seemingly erase the memories of our nighttime adventures? What happens to the thoughts, emotions, and experiences that unfold in the realm of our subconscious? In this exploration, we’ll delve into the mysterious world of dream forgetting, uncovering the scientific, psychological, and philosophical explanations behind this universal phenomenon.
The term “Dream”
A dream is a series of images, thoughts, and emotions that occur during sleep, typically in the rapid eye movement (REM) stage. Dreams are a universal human experience, and research suggests that we spend around 20% of our sleep time in REM, where dreams unfold.
Everyone dreams, but not everyone remembers it,” says licensed psychologist and board certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist Shelby Harris, PsyD, an associate professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. And as it turns out, there are a few reasons why you might remember or you might not — and whichever it is probably doesn’t predict how well you’re sleeping.
Most of Our Dreams Happen During REM Sleep
When it comes to the question of why we dream, sleep medicine research has in fact revealed perhaps surprisingly little.
“While there’s no consensus about the functions of certain stages of sleep, the reality is that there’s not a firm consensus about why we sleep in general,” says sleep expert Wendy Troxel, PhD, senior behavioral scientist at the RAND corporation and author of Sharing the Covers: Every Couple’s Guide to Better Sleep.
The prevailing theory based on research suggests that the primary reason for dreams is to support emotional processing, she says. “What happens during our dreams may help us work through challenging things that happen during the daytime and that we may not be capable of processing during our waking lives.”
Most dreaming occurs during the rapid eye movement (REM) part of sleep, the stage of sleep where the brain is forming new connections and recalling experiences from the day, says Dr. Troxel. “It’s an opportunity for the brain in an unconstrained way to make sense of the world, problem-solve, think creatively, and support memory consolidation.”
About one-quarter of your sleep time is spent in REM, according to the National Sleep Foundation.
Research also shows that we do dream in non-REM stages of sleep, but these dreams are typically harder to remember, shorter, less intense, and more thought-like compared with dreaming in REM. In contrast, REM sleep dreams may be more story-like.
And it may be that REM sleep plays an important role in emotional processing, and supporting mental health overall, Troxel says.
One study tasked 76 healthy young women with viewing negative and neutral pictures before differing amount of REM sleep. Interestingly, greater amounts of REM sleep was correlated with higher emotional reactivity to viewing the negative pictures (when they were awake) in the short-term compared with those who got no REM sleep. However, after two days, those who had at least one full REM sleep period had less emotional reactivity, as well as number and duration of memories of those negative pictures compared with those who got no or a short amount of REM sleep time.
The results suggest that REM sleep, over time, helps with emotional processing, making negative events less distressing
“This suggests that a function of REM is to smooth out the edges of our emotional lives and help us selectively forget some of the negative things that happen so we don’t feel so overwhelmed by it,” she explains.
Though it’s worth noting that because there’s limited research looking into these questions — and because most of the studies that have been done are relatively small — dream researchers still consider these theories rather than established facts, Troxel says.
While recalling a dream suggests that you’ve reached a REM sleep cycle at some point during the night, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve had more or less of that important stage of sleep than if you don’t remember dreaming.
If you remember your dream, it could be that you simply woke up during it, so it’s fresh in your mind, says Deborah Givan, MD, sleep specialist and professor emeritus at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.
Or remembering could mean that you’re remembering the very last dream you had rather than the dream in full. People tend to have most of their “dream sleep” in the second half of the night, she explains.
If your REM sleep accounts for 25 percent of a seven-hour sleep, that’s a little less than two hours in total — of which you might only remember the last 10 minutes vividly.
Factors affecting dreams and dream recall
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.
The following can influence whether or not you remember your dreams:
- Anxiety Levels Before Bed: People are more likely to remember their dreams when they’re anxious or depressed, Harris says, perhaps because they also tend to wake up more when they’re worried, and do so in the middle of various dreams.
- Medication or Health Problems: Certain medicines, including some drugs that treat depression, can suppress dream sleep, says Shyamsunder Subramanian, MD, a sleep medicine specialist at Sutter Tracy Community Hospital in Tracy, California. Similarly, sleep apnea (a condition characterized by short pauses in breath many times while you sleep) can also minimize the time you spend dreaming.
- Gender and Personality: Past research has found that adolescent girls were more likely than their male counterparts to remember their dreams. This study also found a link between creativity and dream recall: Participants with stronger dream recall were more likely to identify themselves as creative compared with those less likely to recall their dreams.
