Why do remember dreams

About two-thirds of both groups recalled dreams during the study. Those who woke during REM sleep and successfully recalled their dreams were more likely to demonstrate a pattern of EEG oscillations called theta waves in frontal and prefrontal cortex areas — the parts of the brain where our most advanced thinking occurs.

The upshot is that even when we are asleep, the same parts of our brains are on the alert for things to remember. You might be wondering: Does whether or not you can recall imaginative stories from the night before say something about the quality of your sleep?

When it comes to the question of why we dream, sleep medicine research has in fact revealed perhaps surprisingly little. Experts suspect the purpose of our dreams may be to help us deal with emotional problems from daily life, to be creative, or to sort through memories and other thoughts, among other theories, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Research has revealed more about the mechanics of dreaming, and thus why we sometimes remember dreaming and sometimes do not.

Most dreaming occurs during the rapid eye movement REM part of sleep, the stage of sleep that most of us spend about 20 percent of the night in, explains Shyamsunder Subramanian, MD , a sleep medicine specialist at Sutter Tracy Community Hospital in Tracy, California.

If you remember your dream, it could be that you simply woke up during it, so it's fresh in your mind, says Deborah Givan, MD , sleep specialist at Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis.

Harris says. The best time to try to recall your dreams is in the first 90 seconds after you wake up, before the memory goes away. Sleep is essential to health, and deep sleep is the most important of all for feeling rested and staying healthy. Find out how much you should get…. Experts say you can prepare for the end of daylight saving time for days in advance. Among the recommendations is outdoor physical activity. Here's everything you need to know about shopping for the….

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Legg, Ph. Share on Pinterest. Why we dream. Remembering dreams. Why some people remember and others forget. Does dreaming affect sleep quality? Read this next. In the brains of dreamers, their default mode networks are typically more active and connected during both waking and sleeping hours, Vallat said. This extra connectivity and activation may help dreamers remember their dreams. But it also may make dreamers more prone to flights of fancy in general.

In other words, the same people who report a rich dream life may also spend their days with their heads in the clouds. It may not come as a surprise, then, that dreamers are also more prone to waking up at night, and have longer periods of wakefulness, as another study by Vallat found in This wakefulness is another must-have component of memory formation.

And brief periods of awakenings — around two minutes — is enough time for dreams to be encoded into long term memory, the paper explained. When it comes to intellectual gymnastics, grey matter drives performance. Gray matter makes up about half of our brains, with white matter making up the other half. If you think of a brain as a computer, gray matter would represent the information processing systems. And white matter would act as the cables that connect these different components together, allowing brain communication to flow.

Vallat and a research team found that people who frequently remember dreams have more white matter in a region of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region linked with processing information about oneself. This finding is yet another piece of evidence that shows brain connectivity is somehow important in dream recall.

But having more white matter may not just help you remember your dreams, it may also promote dream creation. As prominent neuropsychologist Mark Solms found in the early s , people who developed rare, brain-damaging lesions within the white matter of the medial prefrontal cortex reported that they stopped dreaming altogether.

Another interpretation is that they stopped dreaming. But for most people, much of dream recall boils down to individual characteristics — some within our control, and some not.