And this despite the fact that in a sleeping state we sometimes experience stronger emotions than in reality.
We seem to have woken up and remember very well what we dreamed about, but literally an hour passes – and almost all memories disappear. Why is this happening? If some of the events in our dreams happened in real life – say, an affair with a movie star, then it would forever be imprinted in your memory and, possibly, in your social media page. But in the case of dreams, we quickly forget the most incredible events.
There are several widely accepted theories to explain the fleeting nature of dreams. Two of them, cited by the Huffington Post, explain dream forgetting as very beneficial from an evolutionary point of view. The first one claims that if a caveman remembered how he jumps from a cliff and flies, running away from a lion, he would try to repeat it in reality and would not survive.
The second evolutionary theory of forgetting dreams was developed by Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, who explains that the function of sleep is to rid our brain of unnecessary memories and associations that accumulate in it over time, which clog it. Therefore, we forget them almost immediately.
One of the biggest difficulties when trying to remember a dream is that we remember real events in chronological order, linearly, and taking into account cause and effect. Dreams, however, do not have such a clear arrangement in time and space; they wander and drift through associations and emotional connections.
Another obstacle to remembering dreams is our life itself, with its worries and stresses. The first thing most of us think about when we wake up is the upcoming business, which makes the dream instantly dissolve.
The third factor is the movement and orientation of our body in space, since we usually dream at rest, lying horizontally. When we get up, the numerous movements produced thereby interrupt the thin thread of sleep.
To improve your ability to recall dreams, you need to solve these three natural problems: linearity of memory, preoccupation with current affairs, and body movement.
Terry McCloskey from Iowa shared his secrets with Shutterstock to help him solve these problems and remember his dreams. Every night he starts two alarm clocks: the alarm clock reminds the awakening consciousness that in the morning he will have to think about pressing problems, and the musical alarm clock inspires him that everything is in order and that you can concentrate on sleep.
McCloskey also puts a pen and notebook on the nightstand. When he wakes up, he takes them out, making a minimum of movements and not raising his head. Then he tries first to remember his feelings and emotions during sleep and only then allows the memories to form free associations (psychoanalytic technique), and does not force them to line up in a linear chain of events. Terry does not part with the notebook throughout the day in case he suddenly remembers pieces or feelings from previous nights.
By the way, there are now many applications for smartphones and smartwatches that allow you to quickly record dreams before they disappear. For example, DreamsWatch for Android allows you to tell a dream on a recording device, making very few movements, and its vibrating alarm clock sends a signal to the cerebral cortex that everything is in order and you can not worry about the present for now.
If you want to memorize your dreams (without thinking about lions!), Then such techniques can greatly improve the process of remembering our nightly adventures and retrieving them from memory.