Why don’t we remember our dreams?

If you’ve regularly tried to remember your dreams, you have probably realized that we forget most of our dreams almost immediately upon waking.

Scientists don’t entirely understand why dreams are so hard to remember. A hypothesis (a hypothesis can be thought of as an “educated guess” - an answer that seems possible given what is currently known) is that there is a disconnect between what the brain would need to do to form memories of our dreams and what the brain does best while we’re asleep. The sleeping brain is working hard to store memories from our waking day. It’s also working hard to adjust connections between ideas, helping us to wake up in the morning with a fresh perspective. These abilities require different types of cellular communication and different brain connections than creating memories.

When we wake up, the brain has to do a quick transition so that we can begin creating memories again. Most of the time, that transition doesn’t seem to happen fast enough for us to remember our dreams. If you wake up and begin thinking or writing about your dream, that can help you to remember it. While you’re thinking about your dream, you’re giving your brain time to transition from its overnight focus on storing memories to its daytime focus on creating new memories. Once it’s made that transition, the details you’re thinking about will be more likely to be stored in memory - so you can describe that dream to someone even hours or days later.

If you’re someone who has the experience of “never dreaming,” it’s very likely that you are dreaming — but you’re forgetting your memories so soon upon waking that you never remember the experience of dreaming!