Weird thing about dreaming - anyone else notice this?

[Don_Draper]

I used to remember my dreams quite vividly as a younger man. In the past decade or so, not so much. A lot of the time, I recall drifting off to sleep, then being awake the next morning (or whenever), but nothing in between. However, I have noticed one weird facet which may be just me: I typically have vivid recall of my dreams whenever I sleep in a place that is not my typical bed.

I noticed a few years back when I was floating around between apartments. For a stretch of a few years, various circumstances caused me to move around to a few different places (including moving to a new city) every six months or so. Each time I moved, I would have intense dream recollection on the first or second night in my new room, before losing it again.

I’ve noticed this same thing whenever I stay over a night in someplace different from my normal bedroom. Whenever I am out of town and stay in a hotel or at a friends’ house, I can recall great detail about what I dreamed. Once or twice, on a lazy Sunday, I would doze off on the couch on my living room and began dreaming.

Even just changing the position of my bed in my bedroom triggered it. This past weekend, I decided I did not like how I had laid out my bedroom and moved things around, so that the bed was against another wall. Guess what?

My question is/questions are – is this a normal facet of dreaming? Does anybody else notice this happening to them? And if this is a typical occurrence, any ideas as to what causes it?

[Walken_After_Midnight]

I’m not dream-ologist, but maybe it could be related to how soundly one sleeps? One way of increasing the number of dreams one remembers is to wake up more often in the night.

We have several REM cycles in the night, and they get longer and longer toward morning. If you only record the last dream you had before you get up in the morning, there are more dreams you might not be remembering.

…

Since you usually only remember the last dream you had, you can remember more dreams by waking up several times during the night. We go through a complete sleep cycle approximately every 90 minutes, so you may find it productive to set your alarm to wake you at some multiple of 90 minutes (such as 4.5, 6, or 7.5 hours) after you expect to go to sleep. Dreams in the later half of the night are typically longer than those you dream soon after going to sleep, so you probably want to wait until at least the 4.5 hour mark to intentionally wake yourself.

So sleeping in an unfamiliar bed, with associated unaccustomed light, noise and comfort issues, might cause one to wake more often in the night and therefore remember more dreams. Or perhaps it could just be that new experiences generally tend to imprint themselves more readily in the memory than the mundane and routine day-to-day.