Why we forget dreams and how to remember more

The short answer

Dream interpretation is not prediction and not diagnosis. This article separates what sleep research observes from what popular interpretation associates with the theme, always saying which is which.

We forget dreams because the sleeping brain does not record well what it goes through, and the little that stays is lost in the first few minutes after waking, when attention turns to the day. Research shows that people who remember a lot have slightly different brain activity and wake up for longer during the night, which gives the dream a chance to be stored.

The good news is that recall improves with practice. Paying attention to dreams and writing them down increases the number of dreams remembered, especially in people who remember few. If you first want to understand what dreaming is for, see why we dream.

Read also: Dream journal: how to keep one and Lucid dreaming.

Why the dream slips away so fast

William Dement and Edward Wolpert, in 1958, showed that people woken during REM sleep usually report dreams. In other words, we dream several times a night, but we only find out about our dreams when we wake up in the middle of them or right after.

Raphael Vallat and colleagues, in 2017, followed a whole night of sleep in the lab, with sounds played during the night. Larger brain responses to the sounds led to awakenings, and people who remembered many dreams did not have more micro-awakenings than the others, but they woke up more often and for longer. The authors propose that you need to be awake for about two minutes for a dream to move into long-term memory. Someone who sleeps straight through to the alarm and jumps out of bed barely gives the brain that chance.

Sources: Dement and Wolpert, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1958; Vallat and colleagues, Increased evoked potentials to arousing auditory stimuli during sleep, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2017.

High recallers and low recallers

Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub and colleagues, in 2014, compared people who remembered on average about five dreams a week with people who remembered about half a dream a week. Using brain imaging, they saw that the high recallers had more activity in two brain regions, the temporoparietal junction and the medial prefrontal cortex, both while asleep and while awake at rest.

According to the authors, more activity in these areas may favor dream imagery, storage in memory and attention to outside stimuli during sleep, which leads to brief awakenings. In short: remembering few dreams is not a flaw, it is a different way for the brain to work, and it does not mean you do not dream.

Source: Eichenlaub and colleagues, Resting brain activity varies with dream recall frequency, Neuropsychopharmacology, 2014.

See also: Thursday night dreams and Do we dream in color or in black and white?.

Writing it down changes recall

Michael Schredl, in 2002, asked 285 people to fill out a questionnaire and keep a dream diary for two weeks. The diary increased recall in those who remembered few or a moderate number of dreams. Curiously, in those who already remembered a lot, it went down.

David Aspy, in 2016, looked into why questionnaires usually point to fewer dreams than diaries do. The conclusion was twofold: when we are asked from memory, we underestimate how many dreams we remember, and keeping a diary really does increase recall. In other words, you probably already remember more than you think, and you can remember even more.

Sources: Schredl, Questionnaires and diaries as research instruments in dream research, Dreaming, 2002; Aspy, Is dream recall underestimated by retrospective measures and enhanced by keeping a logbook?, Consciousness and Cognition, 2016.

Step by step to remember more

1. Decide before you fall asleep: calmly tell yourself that you want to remember your dream. The intention points your attention there when you wake up.
2. Keep paper and pen by the bed: your phone lights up the screen and pulls in notifications, which wipe out the dream in seconds.
3. Wake up without rushing: if you can, use a gentler alarm or set it a few minutes earlier.
4. Stay still with your eyes closed: before you move, go back to the last scene and pull the thread backward.
5. Write it down right away: even if it is just a keyword, like "stairs" or "aunt." It usually brings the rest back.
6. Record the feeling too: fear, relief, longing. The emotion helps you find the story again.
7. Keep it up for a few weeks: recall tends to grow with practice.

For a ready-made template, see how to set up a dream journal. Training your recall is also the first step toward lucid dreaming.

When remembering too much deserves attention

Remembering many dreams is not a problem in itself. But since high recallers wake up more during the night, suddenly remembering much more than usual can point to more broken sleep. If you wake up tired, wake several times a night or have frequent nightmares, talk to a doctor. See also why you wake up several times during the night and how to have fewer nightmares.

What Freud, faith and folk tradition say

Freud devoted part of The Interpretation of Dreams to this question. Reviewing earlier authors, he recalls that dreams fade in the morning like the stars before the light of the sun, that they are forgotten because they are faint, one of a kind and disordered, and that people who become interested in them remember more. He also noted that a forgotten dream can come back during the day, pulled up by something you see or hear. In the Christian faith, remembering a dream or not does not change one's relationship with God: many churches point out that the main guidance comes from Scripture, prayer and life in community.

In folk belief, forgetting a dream is sometimes seen as a sign that you "were not meant to know," and remembering it as a sign of a message. These are readings from tradition, not predictions. See what dream meanings look like according to science and culture.

Source: Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 1900.