by Hannah Kampen

Created on: November 17, 2010

To understand why people 'forget' their dreams, we must first understand what dreaming is. A dream is a subconscious thought or emotion that your body is trying to find a way to bring to your attention. It can be something that happened that day, or something that happened many years ago. It could also encompass a certain way you feel about things. Our conscious thought and subconscious thought differ greatly, because in our conscious thought, ie. when we're awake, we are able to organize our thought patterns. Our brainwaves seem less chaotic when we can compartmentalize everything streaming into and out of our brain. But when we sleep, our thoughts fly randomly, trying to catch images and be processed in a way that we can understand.

When someone dreams, they can dream up to 200 dreams during R.E.M. sleep, the time period of 2 hours before and 2 hours after deep sleep. R.E.M. stands for 'Rapid Eye Movement', and this is in fact due to our brainwaves during this time. The stimuli in our brain don't shut off when we go to sleep, they just become less active in a physical manner. During deep sleep, it has been reported a person can have up to 40 dreams. Everything that happens in a dream is something your body is trying to tell you. Your mind finds images that you know (ie. a cricket for luck for some people, for others a monster to chase you) and it uses these images in a stream of data to alert you to something that could be troubling you, scaring you, exciting you, or something else.

People forget their dreams when their body and mind are jolted awake without the chance to ease out of deep sleep. It is not a proven fact as to why people forget dreams, but there are many theories. Most of the time, you are unable to remember your dreams if you don't have a chance to go through the final stages of R.E.M. sleep. Deep sleep is when most of your slow dreams occur, and these are sometimes the longest dreams that don't get remembered. R.E.M. dreams are usually the most vivid, fast dreams, such as falling off of a cliff or getting into a wreck. By waking up in the middle of deep sleep, it is like going 2 miles underwater without the chance to depressurize and stepping out of your submarine: it is a shock to your system. There are ways to train yourself to remember your dreams, and of course make sure you take enough B vitamins, but that is for another article someday.

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