Most of us have dreams every time we sleep. If one is not woken up during the dream, it is very difficult to remember the dream at all. However, it has been my experience that it is difficult to remember them even when woken up during the dream. I had a couple of interesting dreams last night for example. I know that they were interesting because I made a mental note to remember them when I woke up. However, I cannot remember much about them at all now. It seems to take a concerted effort to remember most dreams at all.
Why does the brain discard dream memories do easily?
Dreams neither sequence in any familiar sense nor do they utilize common mental symbology. Talking cows and velvet aircraft are equally at home in the sandman’s realm. Once your subconscious gets its hand on the tiller, be prepared for a voyage towards destinations at the edges of your mind’s roadmap.
While dreams will contain many ordinary components of daily experience, their clock rate is immensely quicker than regular mentative processes. What seems to be an hour in your dreams can pass in a mere minute. To achieve this sort of experiential compression, dreams employ intensely loaded ideas, objects or impressions. At their worst (and most therapeutic) dreams force us to confront the bogeymen of our past history. This catharsis permits the mind to cleanse itself of lingering issues to the best of its ability. At their finest, dreams allow us glimpses of our deepest held desires and ambitions. We obtain glimmerings of ideals and utopic visions that do not necessarily manifest often enough in our waking lives.
A lack of turmoil in real life is often carried over into dreams as well. Once major issues of daily living are resolved, sleep often entails a sometimes volitional state (known as “lucid dreaming”). However, should there be substantial amounts of disquiet in a person’s daily existence, dreams can assume an almost frightful dimension. The turbid aspect of personal complications is vividly reflected in one’s nighttime sojourns. To summon up past ghosts and closeted skeletons, dreams will employ anything from movie monsters to childhood playmates. All of these can be properly freighted with deep and significant meaning, regardless of their foreboding appearance. If a person rejects or represses the mind’s need to reconcile unaddressed issues, the subconscious will thrust these same problems to the forefront of their dreams.
A person who suppresses the resolution of internal dichotomies will quickly find their sleep state filled with exactly those personal demons who remain ignored. It is a natural and ingrained response of the mind to heal itself. Anyone who opposes this inexorable process is soon faced with nightmares and their tumultuous scenarios. The ability to vignette our life stories is a healthy and proper function of the brain. Recent studies show that dreams may well serve a vital role in reinforcing structured perception for infants and growing children. It is no great surprise that this process is carried over into adult life with similar intent and result. While the mechanisms of this are deeply ingrained, the ability to discern and remember their nuances are in no way similarly embedded. Only sincere application and personal resolve permit us to appreciate the purview of our subconscious.
Well, Zenster wrote an interesting philisophical diatribe there, but its really not that complicated. As soon as you wake up, you start thinking about things; this immediately clears out your dream memory. You can easily remember your dreams if you train yourself to not “flush out” the memories.
I’ve explained the techniques in many posts, but here’s a quick review of how to improve dream memory:
Forget waking up with an alarm clock; you have to wake up naturally
Practice waking up with your eyes closed (some people do this naturally; for those who don’t this is a very weird concept)
Make a conscious decision that remembering your dreams is important. Simply making it a “high mental priority” will sort of tell your brain not to ignore these memories.
Keep a dream log. Write down whatever you can remember, no matter how small and insignificant. This alone will show instant results.
FWIW, my wife seems to have a VCR capturing her dreams. If it’s a particularly shocking or frightening one, she’ll have me listen to it and help her cope with it. It never fails to amaze me the amount of detail and “plot” to her dreams.
Every now and then I’ll have an exceptional one and it may hang on for a minute or two – rapidly fading – after I wake up. But I rarely have enough memory of it to get much further than, “Wow! I had this crazy dream. I was in, uh, never mind.”
Sorry folks, my post deals rather explicitly with why dreams are so hard to remember. They are not constructed out of familiar fabric. You want to remember your dreams? Start paying close attention to them. Avoid waking up to an alarm. Get extensive amounts of sleep and have a notebook handy.
Dreams are a nearly alien mechanism to most people because many folks maintain nearly rigid linear thought patterns. You want to remember your dreams? Learn to be creative and recombine ideas that do not necessarily belong together.
It is also critical to comprehend where and why dreams occur. This is what I addressed in my post. Once you begin to appreciate the underpinnings and content of your dreams, you begin to have a way to assign some sort of schematic or structure to them. After you are able to frame them to some degree, it becomes much more easy to interpret them. Knowing how to interpret your dreams enables you to retain and remember them to a gigantic extent.
Unless you have a solid understanding of how and why you dream (see my first post), you will have little chance of remembering them.
How many of you who criticized my first post have the ability to remember your dreams? I have successfully written out four page dream sequences many times in my life.
I happen to fancy myself quite the dream expert and have extensivly explored the vast and many naturally induced altered states of consciousness. I’m an avid and proficient lucid dreamer and, needless to say, have excellent dream recall.
I respectfully disagree with much of what you have posted.
Thank you for responding, TP. I’ll certainly agree that your recommendations for retaining dreams are spot on. I’d be curious as to where you are at odds with what I posted, regardless of how archaic your terminology sometimes is.
I was just reading within the last couple of days that during sleep there is suppression of some chemical that inhibits creation of memories. It was quite specific, though did not address itself specifically to the issue of remembering dreams. I am sure that you would be interested in a concrete biochemical answer to your question, if one exists. I can’t remember if it was online or a hard copy magazine; I’ll see if I can figure out where I read that (apparently this chemical was being suppressed as I was reading )
I don’t really have a problem remembering my dreams(usually quite vivid 4 nights a week on average), but rather figuring out what the hell they are supposed to be. Dream books don’t help, because my dreams, rather then being whacked out are usally mundane but wierd. More like a David Lynch movie then a whacked out Fantasy.
No expert here, but I think that’s a large part of the key to remembering dreams. As you remember them, you’re applying conscious thought patterns/logic to your memory of the dream. Your mind will, I think, try to fill in the blank spots with what makes sense as you remember. While in a dream, you’ll jump from location to location, people’s identities change as you’re talking to them, something won’t faintly resemble what you know it to be, etc. All of that executed in a dream makes sense and feels right. Conscious thought doesn’t accept those things and, when awake, will either restructure the dream to make conscious sense, or automatically dump what doesn’t fit.
Under normal circumstances, dreams are not stored in long term memory because the activity of the hippocampus (a structure in the brain) is suppressed during dream sleep, as has been confirmed in fMRI studies (that’s functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). The hippocampus is apparently necessary for the production and storage of memory–people who have bilateral hippocampal damage cannot make new memories (exactly like Lenny in Memento). Just like sleep induced paralysis, nature has decreed that it is better that you do not remember your dreams.
If you wake up during a dream, it of course is in your short term memory–waking also activates your hippocampus; thus, if you concentrate on your dream immediately after waking (i.e., by writing it down) you can transfer it to your long term memory before it fades away.
Good for lucid dreaming, but for simple remembering, a very abstruse prescription.
They occur in our brains. As for why? Neurobiologists have yet to figure that out. Lets us not mix pseudoscience into this.
There is no secret behind dreaming; again, let us not mix pseudoscientific new agey psychic astrological stuff into the mix. Dreams are not symboblic or methaphorical, they are literal. Only a literal (and therefore, un-insightful) kind of interpretation can be applied to dreams.
They are not going to reveal solutions to your life’s problems.
Your dreams are not going to reveal any deep insight into your psyche. They merely reflect the thoughts and beliefs you already have.
Wrong and very misleading. All you need to do is practice proper waking techniques and place an interest in remembering your dreams. There is no need to get any deeper or more philisophical.
I really do not see the need to treat dreaming as some sort of metaphysical occurrence. They are nothing more than interesting (okay, downright fascinating) hallucinations that occur as a result of the cesation of external sensory input. Neurobiologists may not have all the answers, but I strongly disagree with appointing any kind of metaphysical explanation.
When I asked “where,” I meant; “In what part of our brain?” This also includes the question as to which sector of our mind inserts all of the images (plus their sequencing and interaction) into our dreams.
The ability to remember events and patterns is most definitely improved by learning to retain sequences that do not necessarily have any obvious connection. To refine this skill requires the enhancement of mnemonic methods. This is of great assistance in recalling the disjunct and often jumbled episodes of dreams. While dreams do not always have a linear progression, they frequently exhibit a fundamental theme or identifiable thread of meaning to them.
As to why dreams happen, there is an increasing body of thought that finds useful purpose in dreaming. An article I read mentioned how dreaming is critical for the reinforcement of reliably structured neurological functioning. Perceptual mechanisms and recall functions are supposed to be honed by this sort of recreational reenactment. I fully concur with this notion.
I’ve experienced dreams where I’ve had the portable 88 note polyphonic digitally controlled music synthesizer I designed back in 1972 sitting on my lap (in full hardwood and illuminated glass front pushbutton configuration). I’ve played the harpsichord and spoken foreign languages with fluency that I do not possess. I’ve piloted WW II bombers (complete with sluggish stick and G forces) and repeatedly flown as if I possessed wings. I’ve awoken lucidly in my dreams and exclaimed to myself (correctly) that my corporeal body was overseas while I visited such a stateside location in my sleep. These are not the random firings of a restless brain stem. Nor are they disorganized mentative processes. What they are might be open to debate, but they are not mere intellectual flotsam and jetsam. I give you some cites about sleep’s function with respect to the brain.
An excerpt from an otherwise questionable site dealing with adult retention of in-utero trauma:
[sup]BOLDING ADDED[/sup]
Another exceptionally pertinent excerpt from a very well written (and worth reading) article:
Please refrain from such insulting labels as “pseudoscience,” “psychic” and “astrological” while discussing this topic with me. Nowhere is such repellent drivel mentioned in my own discourse. I make some effort to work from a basis of fact and it would become you to do so as well. I shall now request cites for the positions you take, just as I am doing my best provide them here.
I do not say there is any mystic or arcane secret (save perhaps, unmapped brain functions) involved with dreaming. Neither do I say that they are the end all and be-all of mental processing. However, I certainly do think that they serve a very useful role. I find it amusing that you deny dreams one of consciousness’ most glaring traits. Metaphor may well be one of the greatest hallmarks of consciousness. If anything, dreams are rife with this amazing form of analogue. To say that dreams are only literal is to deny a depth of the mind that automatically defies the human brain’s uniqueness. I would venture how animals most definitely have literal dreams, but that humans are not at all confined to that realm. While dreaming may well serve as the recreational reinforcement mentioned before in both animals and humans, the sheer fact of human consciousness seemingly permits our dreaming to take on further dimension. If dreams are so unimportant, why would you yourself take the time to remember and write them down? Please respond to this question.
I regret that you have such a low estimation of your own cortical functions. I find my own worthy of intense and deep consideration. Again, you deny that a well versed attitude towards dreaming is necessary for best retention or appreciation of same. I say that you are most definitely wrong. The greater number of related perceptual tags or labels you establish regarding your own comprehension and retention of dreams, the better you shall do at it.
Neither do I appoint any sort of metaphysical explanation to dreaming or dreams. I fail to see where you have garnered such a completely and totally wrong headed notion from my own words. While cessation of external sensory input may be a critical trigger for the onset of dreams, this in no way prevents them from serving a much more refined function than the mere shunting of extraneous nervous impulses.
Au contraire. I came into this thread to post something similar and read what Zenster had posted and decided I would not have said it as well. It is indeed the explanation for why it is hard to remember dreams, touching on all three of the reasons I was going to mention:
our memory/understanding of our dreams isn’t encoded in words the way everyday experience is (“does not utilize common mental symbology”);
intense compression – because you aren’t actually having the experiences but instead are thinking about them utilizing non-word-encoded emotional shorthand of sorts, the sequence of things happening that feels like an afternoon or a couple of days is actually a couple of minutes (“clock rate”);
and thirdly, partly as a consequence of the “not encoded in words” thingie, significant meanings and intense emotional truths are attached to events in a haphazard way that makes remembering them as difficult as remembering all the Russian written on a page of Russian literature when you neither know Russian nor comprehend the Cyrillic alphabet. That is, the events and the sequence in which they occurred and how you felt about them and what they seemed to mean at the time and why x happening caused y to happen shortly thereafter and so on are hard to remember because the “logic” of those connections just doesn’t make the same kind of consistent sense as events in the real world. The fragments you can remember are usually the parts that hang together better, but as Zenster says (“talking cows and velvet airplanes”) much of dream-experience just doesn’t.
First off, I DO agree that dreams serve a useful purposes. I’m well aware of the “asimilation” dreaming seems to function, and with the purposes you mention. I’m sure you’re aware of the studies that show people who are prevented from dreaming soon show marked failure of their mental capacities. I did not mean to imply that dreaming is not purposeful; I simpy did not mention the above as I assumed it was “common knowledge”.
I can close my eyes right now and imagine those things, too. Dreams just provide a vehicle for making the imaginings more vivid.
Its still just imagination, but on a grander scale.
I agree with what’s been said. Dreaming does serve an important purpose.
Now, perhaps I was wrong about using the terms pseudoscience, et al. BUT the reason I brought that up is because your first post was very abstruse and gave no clear, practical advice to the OP. Instead, it was filled with a lot of - frankly - psychobabble. This only intimidates those who want simple, practical things they can do to have “more fun” with the dream experience. Time and time again I read posts like yours that make out dreams to be some sort of mystical realm that requires some sort of special discipline to enter; this is not true and not helpful.
There are easy, practical things anyone can do to improve dream recall; there is no need to play psychologist.
…or…you can just tell 'em to keep their eyes cloesed and turn off the alarm clock
I don’t think they’re unimportant. I just don’t think there is anything spiritual about them. I enjoy the dream realm because its fun. Nothing more. There’s no need to get deep.
Obviously the more well-versed you are the better will be your dream recall and your overall dream experience. You seem to have this attitude that a person must prove they have “educate themselves” before they will be allowed to learn the secrets of the dream recall. I think this is rediculous. I listed the steps; he can start them today and he’ll be remembering dreams by tomorrow.
Replace metaphysical with spiritual and replace explanation with interpretation. And again, I know dreams serve a useful purpose.
