Why are dreams hard to remember?

Why are dreams hard to remember?

I heard somewhere that your brain doens’t remember them because it doesn’t need to, but then again you remember a lot of other stuff that you don’t need to remember.

Maybe it has something to do with your brain working on other things while you are sleeping and doesn’t have enough power to remember as well.

If you have any suggestions reply with them. If we can figure out why they are hard to remember, maybe we can figure out a way of combating that.

I reckon it’s something which you learn to do as a child. When you are born, your mind is unable to differentiate between dreams and reality. As you develop, reality and dreams are slowly separated and you learn to store the dream memories as dreams (and something which you don’t have to remember).
You therefore get into the habit of not remembering your dreams.
To start remembering your dreams again, I suppose you are ‘unlearning’ some habit formed a long time in the past which is why it is so difficult.

Well, that’s my theory, anyway.

Let me add that the memory is not fully functional before we are about two years old. That is why people often find it impossible to remember thing from when they were babies.

I speculate that it has to do with our state of consciousness. When we are fully awake we better remember “fully awake memories.” When I’m in a dream I find that I can easily recall lots of dreams that I can’t remember when awake. It is like an “inner dream memory.”

An example would be: IWL if you are at school you have “school consciousness” and you remember when you walk into the door “Darn, I forgot my homework.” but when you are home you have “home consciousness” and you forget homework unless you try to remember, and sometimes Vice Versa. You might forget all about home related things while you are at school … or work. :wink:

Dreaming and waking life are a bit different though. A little more extreme. Dream consciousness can seem like a different lifetime, with different settings than real life and different time scales. So it may be more rare to see objects in real life that we seen in dream life to remind us of that dream.

Whoooo! this is getting complicated, I’ll stop confusing you. :wink:

but I don’t believe we “forget” dreams, we just “misplace” them. The brain has everybit of it stored somewhere.

I’ve never been any good at remebering dreams, but when it comes to Lucid Dreams, I can remeber as much as I can from the day before. I think remebering normal dreams are hard becouse you’re not as much a part of it as U are in the real world or the LD world.

And as DreamAddict sad Remebering dreams in dreams migth be easy (havn’t tested) since U have direct acces to your underconscious mind. You can get clear memories about everything in your life.
I’m doing some testing on this, I think that implanting text in movies (as one frame U wont know U saw) U can read books not knowing it and let your dreams tell you the story. same teqnics where used in cinemas many years ago to make people buy more popcorn.

Hi

Maybe it has something to do with your brain working on other things while you are sleeping and doesn’t have enough power to remember as well.

I don´t think so.The moment i wake up i normally remember my dreams,but if i don´t write them down i forget them immediatly.It also happened to me some times that i woke up and remembered a dream.The i turned around in my bet to take the pencil that lies on the table next to my bet,and while doing this i forgot the dream.

So,i think it isn´t hard to remember a dream,but if you think of anything else while you wake up you are likely to just “overwrite” you dream-memory with the new thought.

Traumgänger

After a period of several years writing down nothing, I started a new DJ three months ago. Recalling dreams now gets better and better. (With a few days in between of no recall at all :grrr: ).

Sometimes I wake up remembering nothing at first, but it comes back to me after several minutes after waking up. :cool:

I guess it is also a matter of training your dream recall. Get used to remembering your dreams and it will be easy! :smile:

I hadn’t kept a dream journal for a while, and I started back up again about 6 months ago. Now I can recall at least 3 dreams most nights (sometimes many more).

After I wake up, I roll over to my writing side (within reach of my pen/paper) and lie very still. Sometimes I shut my eyes and I think back to the last thing that I was thinking of - (even letting myself drift back out of consciousness a little). I then work backwards saying ‘what was I doing before that?’. I write down all the key words.

I find that this is a very effective way of keeping a dream journal. It’s just typing it up the next day that becomes a bit tedius.

DreamAddict- interesting idea–i will try that next time i go lucid. I have never remembered a dream in a dream before, but that might be because my dreams aren’t very vivid and i don’t have the conscious levels i would like.

Thanks for posting everyone :wink:

I believe it has to do with the way in which your mind stores memories. Often many of the memories which we access are directly a result of a previous thought which helped us retrieve that memory. This is because memories in the brain are often linked, and accessing one helps us find the paths to other closely related ones. When you are in a mindset similar to when you first recorded the memory, it is easier for you to find these paths and retrieve it. This is why we often have difficulty remembering things from early childhood – our brains and our mindsets are so different now that it’s difficult for us to ever stumble upon paths to early memories. Similarly, if you study for a test in the room where you will actually take the test, you will remember more of the material because your surroundings will trigger some memories from when you were studying in that exact same place.
So I think the reason it’s hard to recall dreams is because your mindset while sleeping is so drastically different than your mindset while awake, that it is hard to find and access thoughts that are recorded in your brain in a way which is far removed from your current thought process.
Keep in mind, I only took Pscyh 1, so take it for what it’s worth… :alien:

Wow, Virgel says it perfectly. That is what I believe also. This explains why you can remember a dream while laying on your back, but as soon as you roll onto your stomach you forget it.

Often when I forget things, not just dreams, I try to “rewind” myself and retrace my steps and thoughts. Or when I’m trying to remember dreams I try laying in many different postions and possibly re-create the position I was in when I dreamt it. It helps a lot.

DA, you deserve a bottle of wine or something because this “inner dream memory”-talk of you has MADE ME LUCID last night :partying_face: after a LONG dry period (2 weeks :grrr: ) . I was talking to a girl and she said something that I had heard earlier in a dream… It was exactly the same sentence as in that dream but I still didn’t realize that I was also dreaming at the moment I “remembered” the dream :nono: . My initial reaction was this: I said to her “hey I have heard this same sentence in a dream, so that was a PRECOGNITIVE dream wasn’t it?”. She had a very skeptical reaction so I thought about other possibilities… :confused: … and then I remembered this thread and Dream Addict’s post about remembering dreams in dreams and suddenly I reached that beautiful state of high lucidity… Unfortunately, I woke up after some seconds because I was too excited… but I’m still very glad with the success because I finally put an end to this dry period
:beer:

This is clearly a case of FILD: Forum-Initiated Lucid Dream :cool:

Wow! :thumbs: That’s great! :mrgreen:

I’ll drink to that. :beer:

I love the new acronym “FILD”, that’s perfect. I love when LD’s are triggered from something from this forum. And it happens quite often. Or even once I become lucid, I think “Okay, I’ve got to remember the details so I can write about this in the forum.”

This forum and our “meeting of the minds” helps more than I can explain with becoming lucid, and a good source of neat things to do once lucid. My lucid sleep life would suffer without it. :content:

I think its simply how the brain works-we have problems remembering our dreams cause brain sorts it on the side-its not necessary for us to remember all dreams so the brain sets those memories on the side.
if our dreams were important to our survival or something related i guess we`d remember them perfectly.

Secondly-like everything also memory has its spot in the brain-when we sleep it might be asleep too,resting,whatever-it doesnt have to be this way but its pretty possibile.(similar to time disortions)

Well here I have the link to a web site that answers the question:
Why is Dream Forgetting Common?

My theory is more or less the same as the rest of yours, which are more or less the same. But anywho here’s my idiosyncratic version:

I see the reason as being, (besides the obvious you don’t want to bother remembering because its not important enough for you to remember etc.) an issue of the ineffability of all altered states. I explain it like this so it can work for drugged states as well.

You can’t do your altered states justice in explaining it in normal consciousness by the very fact it is a different state of consciousness. It’s not normal consciousness so you aren’t going to be able to explain (or process) it properly using the tools of normal consciousness(reasoning, logic, others).

This would explain why things make sense in dreams, that don’t make any sense in real life. It’s dream logic that is followed while you’re in the dream state, and normal logic while you’re in the normal waking state.

In lucid dreams you are in a border line state, so that the normal consciousness tools can be more readily applied to the dream. Thus we can remember lucid dreams easier.

WARNING!!! IF YOU’RE IN DOUBT look: OF LUCID DREAMING OR LOW ON IT THIS MIGHT HURT IT MORE:

continuing with the above theory. As you become more aware of your dreaming activity you start to apply more normal logic to the experience of dreaming, and are able to then remember more of the dream. However then, this is changing the dream state to a more normal waking state (i figure the state is decided by the tools available). And if you are of the nature of inhibiting creativity etc. in your waking state you are also going to have these tools available to possible application in the dream. :crying:
-but like in waking life you really have just as much control over whether or not you use them. (some emoticon wiping the tears away and kinda cheering up.)

sorry about the long reply and being off topic abit…:sleeping: :zzzz: …heh…guys(shaking you)