Every once in a while i wake up and think: “what a cool dream!”. But virtually minutes later I have trouble remebering the cool dream. I’m referring to dreams that we recall fairly well upon waking but soon fade into nothingness sometimes minutes later?
And towards the end of the day I wouldn’t be sure I even had that dream. ANyone know of Psychology findings about why dreams are so hard to keep in memory?
I was wondering this myself just the other day.
(Cross-posted from a thread on NADS): as I understand it, all memories go first into short-term (electrical) memory before being fixed in long-term (chemical) memory. This is why you can’t remember the two minutes preceding being knocked unconscious - that memory hasn’t been ‘fixed’ yet, so it just dissipates. So why should the transferral of dreams be different?
Maybe your brain is hard-wired to consider them nonsense? I just had a dream where a penguin (yes, the regular sized cute animal) was trying tenaciously to bite me, apparently to death. I was finally forced to hold it down and cut off its head with a pocket knife, which resulted in my dream being very unfruitful in the area of rest.
Perhaps we forget our dreams so we don’t remember when our brain messes up.
Okay, I buy the short term / long term explanation, but to take it a step further, how come sensations like pain - real pain, like breaking a bone - don’t become memories but pleasing sensations (like the ocean wave effect) are subject to memory storage and recall.
I recall vividly the image of my arm when I broke it years ago, but other than saying that “it hurt like hell” I have no recollection of the pain.
Come to think of it, though, I broke a thumb a couple years after breaking my arm and I knew, intuitively, right away, that it was broken, even before I looked at it.
Sorry if this gets off topic from the OP.
Another factor is the type od sleep we have over a typical night. Dream researchers usually wake people up and reord content when they spot “REM - Rapid Eye Movement” sleep when dreaming is occuriing.If they allow the subjects to sleep on through the nigh , as it were, a different stage of sleep occurs and much of the dream memory is lost and become far less vivid. Apparently we dream most nights but don’t remember them as the pattern of sleep tends to erase them. We might wake up from a vivid nightmare but after we goback to sleep we lose detail. Maybe it is some coping mechanism so we do not confuse the dream world and the waking reality.
There does seem to be a distinct physiological reason for this. A similar phenomenon is the fact that you rarely realise that you are dreaming while dreaming; no matter how bizarre the reality is that you’re inhabiting at that moment, it seems perfectly natural. The fact that sleep seems to involve a “replenishment” cycle for various brain chemicals and what have you may well be the reason for this.
The theory we were taught in Gestalt Class, and to which I subscribe, is that your conscious mind has a vested interested in not remembering your dreams.
Every single thing in a dream is a construct of your mind. In the Gestalt theory, it is the subconscious’ chance to send a few messages to the conscious. The conscious doesn’t want to see some of this stuff and wants to look upon it as absurd or wierd or … dreamlike. It certainly doesn’t want to face up to it all.
I’d like to think there’s a self-protection mechanism involved, too. I once had a dream about being buried alive in an avalanche: that’s not something I’d like to remember in great detail for the rest of my life. After just a few decades of dreaming, how would you distinguish dream memories from the real ones?
Alright, here we go, a dreaming thread.
Your dreams are not stored in any form of permanance. As soon as you open your eyes and/or beging thinking any thoughts, these new inputs “push out” anything that was already in there. Now, you may be thinking, “but I forget the instant I wake up!”. Well, no, not really. How often do you actually wake up and immediately think “hey! I’m awake!” It never happens that way. Typically you will wake up directly into a thought of “I don’t want to go to work today”, or whatever. The point being, by the time you realize you’re awake, you have already been awake and thoughts have already infiltrated your dream memory.
However, with proper training, you can greatly improve your dream recall. The first and most important step is training yourself to wake up properly. You must be able to wake up with your eyes closed and WITHOUT any thoughts of the day (in other words you must avoid what I described above). Some people can do this fairly easily, some can’t. As soon as you wake up, with your eyes still closed, imagine you are back in the dream. Allow the dream to reform in your mind. Likely you will experience an onslaught of images from the night’s dreaming. As you see them, make a mental note of what is happening.
Next, you must make set the intention in your mind that it is important to you remember your dreams. When you go to bed, tell yourself that it is important that you remember your dreams. Tell yourself that remembering your dreams is something you value. As sengle mentioned, dreams are not considered important. If you can convince your mind otherwise, then remembering your dreams will become important.
Thirdly, make an effort to write down your dreams. The very act of writing them down will help recover lost details. Making the effort to record your dreams also reinforces the above idea that remembering is important.
After this, we can begin working on lucidity 
Oh, and if you wake up to an alarm clock, don’t even bother trying.
But what I find even weirder is that sometimes I don’t remember my dream on waking, and then later in the day, something happens to remind me what I dreamt about. Sometimes even the next day. But then the dream does eventually fade. However the delayed vivid memory is often disconcerting.
From what I understand we dream each and every night, we just can’t recall them at will.
Yes, you are correct. We do in fact dream many many times each night. And we CAN recall them at will if you make a habit of it (see my previous post).
Was dreaming over Christmas about being in a hot tub with Britney and Catherine Zeta Jones - when my mother came in and woke me up. I tried to get back to my dream, but it had evaporated - and now the fantasy is spoiled forever by the absolute conviction that my mother is about to burst in shouting that it’s time to get up. 
You think that’s bad? I actually was in a hot tub with Britney and Catherine over Christmas, and my mother came in to tell me that my tea was ready. It quite “felled my timber”.
Seriously though, last night I noticed my cat in a state of sleeping agitation with her eyes half open and REMing. I woke her up and she nearly jumped out of her skin, then clamped her jaws onto my hand quite viciously. I theorize that, for a while, she was still in her dream for a few seconds.
But given that animals dream, there must, as NutWrench and sengle suggest, be an evolutionary advantage to not remembering them - otherwise animals would go round savaging their kin following nightmares, and we humas would all be full of delusions.
I would love to know the mechanism by which our brains dismiss these memories, though.
I usually wake up around 4:00 and then go back to sleep. If I dream then, I always remember it. In the last one, I was living in a horrible totally dark basement with rats. In the house above me, everyone I ever met in my life was celebrating Xmas. I was very pissed that they wouldn’t come to get me.
dreams are not the product of sleeping, they are the product of waking.
REM sleep is a time when the brain is processing information and making connections and other house keeping chores, when aroused during that process (and arousal can be anything from a sharp noise, to a cough, to discomfort…etc.) the brain immediatly tries to make sense of the flood of imagery, and information and the result is a “dream”.
They seem disjointed and nonsensical becaus they ARE disjointed and nonsensical. You don’t remember them because there is really nothing but confusion to remember.
This isn’t to discount people who analyze their dreams or otherwise see meaning in them, could be that images or memories being processed may trigger arousals simply because they represent something stressfull or otherwise important to a person.
This is a total tangent, but it’s kind of cool.
I was working with Neural Net technologies for a while back in the late 80s, early 90s. This is a technology where you use computer simulations of Neural Nets to try to recreate some of the behavior that intelligent systems display. With a neural net, you train it rather than program it. To train a neural net, you present it with the input data you want, and then the output data that corresponds to that input data. The neural net figures out the relationship between the two.
One thing that researchers found, was that it improved the training if after working with correct data, you did a round of what they called unlearning, where you presented contractory data to the network. There were several explanations for why this worked, one of which was that it eliminated some bad effects that developed in the network and that this was what we did while dreaming.
Who says we can’t remember the last two minutes before losing consciousness? I’ve lost consciousness several times before, and usually I can remember everything… I can even remember my eyes rolling back in my head and seeing the room seem to flip.
From an evolutionary psychology standpoint, we tend to look for patterns that have meaning (that make us fight or flight, that help us procreate, that help us select edible food, that help us advance personal goals, etc. etc.)
Dreams, if you could somehow ‘play’ them on a monitor, would look like jumbles of these patterns, some more emotional than others, but the jumbles would have no ‘anchor’ to hold them together. So they quickly dissipate. That ‘anchor’ is conscious experience, i.e. being awake.