It’s weird how I’ll see a dream and really ponder over it right after waking only for it to be completely out of my memory shortly after.
Dreams don’t really make any sense. When you wake up, you’re remembering the emotions and linking them with images, but as the feelings fade, unless you were actively making them into a narrative, the random stimulus soup doesn’t have any staying power worth remembering. Trying to remember just corrupts your working memory and will make you change and add details that weren’t there. Same reason eye witness testimony is very often wrong.
I don’t know about you, but I can recall and recount perfectly a dream I had almost 15 years ago about a battle in a warzone.
Weirdly enough, two years later I was caught in an irl war. I still think that’s interesting, even though it is most likely coincidence.
I had a dream last night that my bed was filled with centipedes - coincidence?
You don’t form longterm memories while asleep; you lose the last few minutes before you drop off, as well. Short-term memories are held, but they don’t get stored.
And the same applies while you’re dreaming - nothing’s getting recorded. You can pull it out of short-term right after you wake up, but that fades right out.
When you do remember dreams, it’s because you remember remembering them while you were awake. If it was vivid enough to go over hard enough, then the second-hand memory gets stored.
Basically when you sleep only RAM works and no ROM storage is active, when you wake up ROM comes online, if you don’t pull data from RAM fast, it will be overwritten by other things and you lose it forever.
What about recurring dreams though? I’ve had some dreams where the most notable part was that it was a location that only existed in my dreams but I’d been there before in previous dreams. Wouldn’t you need some kind of recollection to notice that?
There’s a few logical possibilities here.
#1 is that whatever stimuli produced it the first time keeps producing it later.
#2 is that you clearly did remember them enough, possibly when you woke up, to commit it to long term memory. This is a tautology, because you would have to remember it to know that it was in previous dreams.
#3, as someone mentioned below, is your mind playing tricks on you. Ever had a dream where you knew an object was something important and specific, even though its appearance in the dream was clearly not that? E.g. you know you’re at your (specific) friend’s house, but that’s not at all what their house looks like. Dreams have a lot of weird substitutions like this, including the idea that you’ve been somewhere before
As with most brain questions, nobody knows exactly.
One theory for the purpose of it, is to prevent us from confusing things we dreamed about with things that actually happened.
Edit: Lol, this always gets downvoted, but it’s the truth. We know nothing about the brain; almost all the studies that get reported on are basically this.
In my case, it is more like 5-20 seconds, not 5 minutes. Do you really remember dreams that long? They raid very rapidly, and I usually remember only those parts that I have repeated myself (thought about) right after waking up.
Interestingly, sometimes I revisit fictional places/topics in the dream, which otherwise I forgot. And upon waking up I am like, “yes, I dreamed about it before”, but I would not remember about it otherwise.
I’ve heard it said that the brain doesn’t distinguish between a real event and an imagined one. Now before you poise your digits with acerbic comebacks, allow yourself a second to think that over.
When you dream, it’s a form of reality for your brain. It believes what is unfolding is actually happening, your pulse may quicken, your heart rate can increase, you can even have a kind of discharge from your male parts if it is realistic enough.
Of course all sweeping generalizations have exceptions and I’m not saying I don’t see how the brain makes clear distinctions between dreams and waking states. What I’m saying is, BOTH dreaming and waking experiences are all parts of what we call “reality.” The dream state is real enough to make our body react according to what is going on our heads.
Just something to think about. The above statement was read to me by a piano teacher who was endeavoring to show me how imagination can make something reality, how thinking about the mood of a piece could make me a better piano player by utiliziing internal imagery.
