We all dream every night. Usually lots of times. But we rarely remember that we’ve had any dreams (unless they were a nightmare that woke us up).
Is that a good thing or would it be better to remember your dreams?
Our bodies repair themselves overnight – it’s the time when we’re least active, so that kind of essential maintenance can best happen.
Whilst we’re sleeping, all sorts of hormones make their way round our body and fix things that need fixing (if you’re still young, that includes making you grow).
Our brain does the same kind of thing – it does a lot of processing that is just easier when there’s less other things for it to concentrate on.
Dreams are part of that process.
Some people use this to do weird and wonderful things like lucid dreaming. But because that’s a more deliberate experience, I’ve talked about it elsewhere on this site (check the link in the previous sentence to explore more).
Regular dreams happen about four to six times every night, sometimes more.
So why don’t we normally remember them?
Scientists aren’t totally sure about the answer to this.
Some of them think that because dreams aren’t our main focus, we simply don’t pay much attention to them.
Others think that our brain doesn’t actually store our dreams along with our regular memories. That would make sense if dreams are just part of our brain sorting things out from the day that’s just happened and making sense of them. So dreams are kind-of an interstitial process – a bit like all those pop-ups we almost automatically close as soon as they appear. And, yes, I know this site is guilty as charged on that front but at least the box doesn’t pop up too often.
Some dreams are in color, others in black and white. Some are vivid – those are the ones we’re most likely to remember – others fade away almost as soon as they happen.
Another reason we probably don’t remember many of our dreams is that they can often be negative. Anxiety comes out in our dreams and sometimes that can result in really bizarre dreams where all sorts of creatures (real and mythical) show up and all sorts of places and situations happen, some realistic, some pure fantasy.
Which probably means that most of our dreams are best left to vanish into the night, unseen.
But just because most of our dreams are the equivalent of our brain taking out the trash, that doesn’t mean they all are.
Even the most negative person will have some good dreams – the law of averages takes care of that. It’s difficult to do studies on this kind of thing but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had more than their fair share of positive dreams as a counter-balance.
Some dreams are more common than others:
Being chased
Falling (maybe endlessly or over and over again like that bowl of petunias in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
Being attacked
Being naked in public or somewhere else inappropriate
Being frozen or paralyzed
Being late (or extra late if merely being late is your default mode)
If you do manage to remember them, dreams can also be confusing.
And that’s without thinking about the dreams that happen inside dreams. They can get extra confusing.
But because dreams are part of our brain processing events, there could be a good reason to remember a few more of the things we dream about because they might give us a clue to something that’s been bugging us for longer than we care to remember.
It’s not as simple as saying to yourself “I want to remember my dreams more often” – if it was that easy, you’d already have done that.
Dreaming is one of our many subconscious activities so it’s best to set the “remember” instruction at a subconscious level.
One of the quickest ways to do just that is to reprogram your mind with subliminal messages. These are benign, so they won’t harm you in any way, but they act as instructions to your subconscious mind to act in a way you’d prefer it to.
Subliminal messages are usually commands that your conscious mind can’t hear but that directly target your subconscious without you having any interaction beyone listening to an MP3.
If that sounds interesting, click this link and start remembering your dreams more often.
Our bodies repair themselves overnight – it’s the time when we’re least active, so that kind of essential maintenance can best happen.
