https://www.popsci.com/science/why-dont-i-remember-my-dreams/?utm_placement=newsletter
Why don’t you remember all your dreams?
- Whether you recall them or not, you likely dream nightly.
By Lauren Leffer
Posted 23 Hours Ago
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2025-01-28>>
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Some mornings, waking up might feel like interrupting a vivid alternate universe. You open your eyes to reality, but the dream you were having still lingers clearly in your memory, complete with characters and plot points. Other days, waking up may be more akin to emerging from a black void with nothing to report.
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Sleeping after a learning task, and dreaming about that task is linked to improvement in subsequent task performance and memory, according to a 2010 study led by Wamsley and a 2012 follow-up. Further, participants remembered negative images from an emotional picture task better after a night of sleep, if they reported recalling a dream, according to a 2024 study led by Zhang. The same study also found that emotional state correlated with dream content (positive dreams from the night before were linked with more positive mood the next day), and those that remembered their dreams became less emotionally responsive to neutral stimuli during follow-up tasks.
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Though don’t let that trick you into over-interpreting the dreams your mind metes out. The Freudian idea that dreams align by any common code, which can be used to analyze your subconscious is “bullshit,” says Wamsley. “There’s no evidence that dreams harbor a secret meaning below the surface level, especially not one that you need a professional to tell you about,” she adds. “The person who is having the dream is the person best-positioned to say what it means. There’s no hidden manual.”
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Wow, this gives me some insights.
It’s no secret in my family that my Mother and Father had terrible dreams. I think it was part of what drove them to drink and madness. In my 30’s, I developed what I labeled “night terrors”. Horrible dreams that would wake me up in a cold sweat, literally drenching the sheets and pillows to where I had to change them. I remember my Grandmother complaining that my maternal Grandfather’s bet was always wet when he arose. Possibly he was having those “bad dreams” too. He never talked much, so I don’t know. Anyway, I learned to deal with the night terrors by recording them and thinking about them. Some were down right comical when you parsed them out. Naked, lost in rooms, seeing long dead relatives, conversations with people I know never met IRL, mixing eras, … … all sorts of strange stuff. Eventually, I settled on the concept that it was my brain “taking out the trash”. And since I didn’t want dementia or to descend into madness, I got in the habit of just ignoring them and getting about my day. Soon the “night terrors” evolved into “interesting adventures” that were no longer scary. And since they had no real meaning, they went into the garbage bin of “forgotten stuff”. Some of my novel and many “index card” short stories sprung from the debris of those dreams.
I found this pop sci summary of the research interesting since it confirms: learned behaviors, meaninglessness of dreams, and unscientifically objectively measurable.
Guess I’ll never really “understand” but I’m not crazy either. Or at least, able to function with my craziness.
YMMV
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Posted by reinkefj 
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