WHY IT IS HARD TO REMEMBER DREAMS?

 Fonya Lord Helm, Ph.D., ABPP

 

Recent research by Perrine Ruby and her colleagues showed that people who can remember more about their dreams had a greater ability to collect and process information from the outside world.   They are more sensitive to sounds in the night and also during dreaming, and they wake up momentarily–although they don’t remember waking–much more often than people who have trouble remembering their dreams.  They then seem to store their dream memories in a way that makes them accessible later (cited by Kim, M., 2014, p. A3).   These “faint flashes” of dream images and feelings than get transferred some kind of longer-term storage, so that remembering is easier.  This model is the “arousal-retrieval model.”

Because of their sensitivity, it seems to me they don’t sleep as deeply.  The good news is that there is hope for us
when we cannot remember our dreams because we are sleeping too deeply.  Freud had the same problem more than 100
years ago.

He was trying to write his most famous book, The Interpretation of Dreams, and he found that in order to remember his dreams, he was: “obliged to exchange my usual bed for a harder one, in which I had more numerous or more vivid dreams, or in which, it may be, I was unable to reach the normal depth of sleep.  In the first quarter of an hour after waking I remembered all the dreams I had had during the night, and I took the trouble to write them down and try to solve them….” (Freud, 1895, p. 69 Footnote).

What is important for us is Freud’s realization that, because of the hard bed, he was unable to reach his normal depth of sleep. Upon waking, he remembered a lot about his dreams–as he said– “all the dreams I had during the night.”   He was very excited with the great improvement in his recall.  (We now know that he could not actually have remembered all his dreams; he did not know that we all dream four of five times a night for 10 to 40 minutes during each dream because that was not discovered until the 1950’s.)

Freud’s memory was unusually good, though.  He had amazing academic achievements, and his friends and colleagues told many stories about his great ability to recall large amounts of information.   Without his prodigious memory, he probably would not have thought that he remembered all the dreams of the night.  People who often remember one or two dreams have very good recall, and more than that is very rare, unless the dreamer is awakened repeatedly in a dream laboratory.

Some of the new mobile apps may help us, too. Some of them will wake us during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when we are dreaming so we can dictate them right away.

References:

Freud, S.  (1983).  On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical
Phenomena:  Preliminary Communication.  Case 2.
Frau Emmy von N.  Standard Edition, Vol. 2, p. 69 Footnote. 

Kim, M.  (2014).  What’s the secret to remembering dreams?  Washington
Post, February 23, p. A3.