How dreams are remembered

A pen and paper on the bedside table, to jot down everything as soon as you wake up. What to do to dream more often. Why some people remember their dreams better than others.

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how to remember dreams

How dreams are remembered

I dreams We must not waste them. And unfortunately, compared to 4-6 dreams Of the average person's sleep, 95 percent evaporates. They are regularly forgotten upon waking. Yet dreams, in addition to inspiring us with creativity, have a connection to real life, and their content is always an ideal framework for providing information about our psychological health. Sleep, to put it simply, is a psychotherapeutic session.

We dream for the 25 percent of our sleeping hours, on average we spend almost 6 years of our life dreaming. Translating the data into hours, that's 50 thousand hours of dreams, and a person between 15 and 75 years old has about 87 thousand of them..

Impressive numbers, which testify to how important and present the dream dimension is in human life: one of the most studied and explored subjects, yet still inexplicable, uncontrollable, and surprising.

Dreams, the main subject of novels, film adaptations, plays, and pop hits, are imagined as foggy, pastel-colored, or with expressive shadows. They take on happy overtones or horror tones, sometimes becoming actual films we watch while we sleep.

In reality, dreaming is a complex and highly refined mechanism that our mind adopts to tolerate, overcome and process the amount of emotional stress that we take in during the day. As if it helped us to 'clean' the mind from the overload of anxieties and emotions that we experience when conscious. To use a computer metaphor, it is as if our brain defragmented the disk during the REM phase of sleep. sonno, the least restorative and the one during which we dream.

ALSO READ: In praise of folly, to make dreams come true. Yesterday Einstein said it, today Zuckerberg says it.

Keep a dream journal

In the morning, however, not all of us remember our dreams, but that doesn't mean we don't dream. Almost everyone has some level of dreaming; cases of men and women who don't dream at all or dream very little are very rare indeed. Much more likely is the case in which, despite dreaming, we are unable to remember what we dreamed, which leads us to claim that we did not dream it.
The problem, therefore, is precisely that of learning to remember dreams, to fix beautiful or sweet dreams in our memory or to process those that perhaps scared us.
There are many techniques, the one that is increasingly recommended by psychologists and psychotherapists is the compilation of the dream diaryIt consists of transcribing in the form of key words the dream images that we remember, but we must do it absolutely first thing in the morning, shortly after opening our eyes, otherwise we will no longer be able to access our memories semi-conscious.
It doesn't matter if we don't remember everything at the beginning, we have to persevere: only in this way will we train our brain to perfect the memory of dreams.

ways to remember dreams

Make an effort to remember immediately

The simple, gentle effort of remembering dreams must be made immediately. Either during the night, when we suddenly wake up, or in the morning, when we first wake up. This is the magical moment, not to be wasted, for focusing on the memory of the dream and its completeness, even narrative. In practice: to remember dreams, you need to do it immediately, before immersing yourself in the daily routine that fuels the multitude of distractions that discourage dream recall.

What to do before falling asleep and as soon as you wake up

Two helpful tips for remembering dreams involve small tricks before falling asleep and upon waking. In the first case, it's important to focus on your dreams and the intention to remember them (it helps to engage your imagination); instead, upon waking, try to stay in bed for a few minutes, without moving too much, and try to recall the dream you had.

App to remember dreams

Also the technology It helps us remember the dreams we have, with numerous app or virtual spaces where we can transcribe, socialize and share our dreams. A kind of collective memory Open to interpretation by all readers, a dream club where everyone can share their dream experiences and share them with anyone who has an account. Groups like this are a sort of group therapy without a therapist or facilitators; in the United States they are very famous and revolve around portals such as World Dream Atlas or Dreambox, where people of all ages (there are 7 participants on World Dream Atlas alone) upload their dreams as soon as they wake up and everyone can comment on them.
Scientists, therefore, have access to this wealth of data, which allows them to study dream activity as if it were a focus group with thousands of participants. The two most common dreams across all latitudes and ages are those of falling and those of flying. As for nightmares, one of the most common is that of appearing naked at important and public events.
Finally, there are other apps that promise to help us remember dreams: Capture, for example, Dream Journal, or, for Apple users only, the Dreams application, which also identifies any more recurring dreams.

The question is only one: do we really want to fill with technology one of the few outposts without connection and control mania? Do we really want to give up one of the few de-technologized spaces we have left to the web?
The answer is not unequivocal, but certainly leaving the world of dreams and the unconscious unexplored is a shame and a loss.

The importance of dreams

Dreaming is very important, and as we've seen, it provides us with the most useful information about our psychological health. But there are other benefits that come from dreams. For example, according to several studies, dreams improve memory, starting the next morning. Dreams act as a learning fixator, so if you dream at night, you remember better in the morning. Furthermore, dreams increase self-esteem, creativity, proactivity, and overall problem-solving ability.

Certainly, in fact, as a recent study by Harvard University underlines, in the person of Dr. Deirdre Barrett , dreaming and remembering the visions we have during sleep, inspires artistic creation and lateral thinking.
Music and art are full of such examples: Salvador Dali he used to sleep sitting up with a key in his hand so that the key falling and clattering on the floor as soon as he fell asleep would wake him up in a semi-conscious state in which he would remember dream images; Stephen King he used a dream to continue writing It, which had been stalled for too long. Or Paul McCartney, who was inspired by a dream to write Yesterday. And again, literary geniuses like Vladimir Nabokov or classical music geniuses like Ludwig Van Beethoven, they used to keep a dream journal for inspiration.
But it's not just creativity: dreams also help us find solutions to everyday problems. One example among many: do you have a relative with whom you've argued and who you continue to dream about?
The answer is that perhaps you are not yet ready to break off relations completely.

Dream Bank

Scientific research increasingly demonstrates how dreaming reflects our everyday experience. How much similarity there is between dreams and reality. This is one of the reasons why psychotherapists use the dreams during their sessions. At the University of California at Santa Cruz there is a DreamBank, the Bank of dreams, which holds 24.035 of them, written between 1916 and 2017. By examining all this complex material through an algorithm, scholars have managed to reach some important conclusions. Men do dreams more violent than women. dreams They change as we move from adolescence to adulthood. Furthermore, everyday experience is the main source of dreams. And finally, the dreams The blind, who are always in need of others in their daily lives, are the most peaceful of all.

What to do to dream more often

To remember dreams, you must first have them. And this isn't a given. There are some tricks to increase our ability to dream.

  • Get the necessary amount of sleepA good night's sleep is the essential prerequisite for having beautiful dreams and then not forgetting them.
  • Sleep comfortably and without interruptionsSleep increases in intensity, duration, and quality if conditions are comfortable and there are no interruptions. This also benefits dreams.
  • Before you fall asleepThink of something that touched you emotionally. And don't just count sheep.
  • We all dreamDon't be discouraged if you have dark periods. We all dream, even when we don't remember anything. Keep trying, and sooner or later your dreams will surface.

Why some people remember dreams better than others

A study carried out by the IMT School of Advanced Studies in Lucca and published on Communication Psychology, has rigorously analyzed the main factors that allow some people to remember dreams better than others. In particular:
  • Sleep quality: A prolonged REM sleep positively affects the ability to remember it. A short non-REM sleep, however, decreases this ability.
  • The time of year: In spring, dreams tend to be remembered better than at any other time of year. This is likely due to the quality of sleep during the spring season.
  • Who marks them in the morning: taking note of your dreams strengthens the habit of remembering them.
  • Greater awareness of one's inner universe can facilitate memory and dream retrieval.

Why it's easy to forget dreams 

While there are some reasons why people remember dreams better, the Lucca researchers also highlighted in their study an answer to the following question: Why do we forget dreams so easily? The answer may involve norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter essential for memory consolidation: during the day, it helps establish long-term memories, but when we sleep, its levels drop significantly. At this point, the brain is unable to remember dreams, which essentially fade away. In fact, we can only do so if we wake up during the night or in the morning as soon as we get up. Furthermore, it's important to keep in mind that forgetting dreams is a form of protection by the brain: if we were to remember dreams for too long, we risk confusing them with reality. And the overlap between dreams and everyday life risks creating a short circuit, from which the brain protects us by making us easily forget dreams.

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