Scientists have explained why we often don’t remember what we dream

Very often you can wake up from a vivid dream and forget it after a few minutes, even seconds.. Dreams occur primarily (though not always exclusively) during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Raid eye movement), says an article published in Scientific American.

During this phase of sleep, brain activity is similar to that of the waking brain, but with some very important differences. One of the main ones is that During REM sleep, the areas of the brain that transfer memories to long-term storage, as well as the long-term storage areas themselves, are relatively deactivated.says Deirdre Barrett, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School. This may be a side effect of REM sleep’s role in memory consolidation, according to a 2019 study on mice in the journal Science.

Areas of short-term memory are active during REM sleep, but they only retain memories for about 30 seconds.. “So to remember a dream, you usually need to wake up from REM sleep,” Barrett says. If you move on to the next stage of sleep without waking you up, the dream will never enter long-term memory.

REM sleep occurs approximately every 90 minutes and increases in length as the night lengthens. The first REM sleep cycle of the night typically lasts only a few minutes, but by the end of an eight-hour night’s sleep, a person has typically been in REM sleep for about 20 minutes, Barrett says.

Thus, the strongest correlation with dream memory is the number of hours of sleep. By sleeping just six hours, you’ll get half as much sleep as an eight-hour night. The last hours of sleep are the most important for dreams.. And people tend to remember the last dream of the night, the one they have right before they wake up.

Traits that influence dream memory

According to a 2008 meta-analysis, women tend to remember some dreams better than men.. Numerous studies have shown that young people remember more dreams than older people. Memory for dreams increases in children from the age at which they can communicate them, stabilizes from early adolescence to early twenties, and then declines very gradually in adults throughout the rest of life, Barrett says.

However, there are many individual differences in dream memory. Some people almost never remember dreams, while others remember several every night.. People who are more introverted and introspective tend to remember more dreams, Barrett notes, while people who are more extroverted and action-oriented tend to remember fewer.

Imagination and susceptibility to hypnosis are also associated with dream recall, as is creativity. Overall, remembering and being interested in dreams appears to be associated with openness to experience, a personality trait characterized by a desire to try new things and explore unusual ideas, according to a 2017 study.

Several studies on lucid dreaming—vivid dreams that the dreamer remembers very well and feels in control—suggest that Certain areas of the brain associated with attention are more active in people who remember more dreams.indicating that underlying neurological differences may play a role.

“Some people don’t pay as much attention to their dreams while they’re happening as others do, just in terms of the brain activity that’s going on,” Barrett says.

Train your brain to remember

However, The brain can be trained to remember more dreamssays Leslie Ellis, a clinical consultant in British Columbia and author of The Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Implementing Simple and Effective Dream Work (Routledge, 2019). She advises clients who want to remember their dreams to wake up, before even moving their body, to think about what they just dreamed and remember as much as possible. Thus, the dream moves from short-term memory to long-term memory.

“Write it down right away and then you’ll have it there,” Ellis says, “because most people quit if they don’t write it down intentionally.”

According to Ellis, dreams are often considered absurd in Western culture. While they may sometimes not make much sense, they often hint at the emotions that people experience in their lives.. “We dream about things we don’t want to see,” he says. “During the day we may repress many of these things, but dreams bring them to the surface.”

uh (Scientific American)