“My wife often tells me her dreams,” says 29-year-old Artem, “but I don’t remember mine at all. This is very disappointing: I would like to remember dreams so that I can decipher them later.” We really have reasons to regret forgotten night images, says Jungian psychotherapist Madina Slutskaya.
“Many facts are known when dreams provided powerful creative clues, and sometimes contained ready-made scientific discoveries or formalized ideas works of art" It cannot be said that by forgetting a dream we lose something. But we may be missing our chance to find something valuable.
In some cases, we don't remember dreams because we really didn't dream anything. “Illness, accident or injury can cause neurological changes that lead to the disappearance of dreams,” explains neurologist and sleep specialist Michel Billard. - Also, dreams may disappear if the phases of paradoxical sleep become too short and too frequent. But such cases are extremely rare.”
Most of us dream every night. And only some forget them immediately after waking up.
Lack of attention
From the point of view of neurologists, our forgetfulness is primarily a consequence of insufficient attention to the world of dreams. “If we are not interested in them, then dreams simply elude us. The same thing happens with other manifestations of our mental activity,” says Michel Billard.
And vice versa, if we become interested in our inner world, our memory improves. She is always focused on what touches us, what seems important. Michel Billard found that women usually pay more attention to their dreams than men and remember them better.
Sometimes it may seem to us that the dreams themselves are not worthy of attention. “In two cases out of three, our dreams show trivial events that happened to us during the day. In a dream, daytime activities and sensations continue, thus giving us the opportunity to understand them, explains Michel Billard. “When events are insignificant, we forget the dream without cluttering up our memory.”
Madina Slutskaya does not entirely agree with this: “If it seems to us that we already know what the dream is talking about, then we are missing its meaning. Any interpretation of a dream is not final; it can change in the context of subsequent dreams and life events.”
First person
Lyudmila, 34 years old, pharmacist
“Every evening, when I go to bed, I tell myself that today I will remember at least one dream. The next morning I write down everything that I remember when I woke up, without worrying about the coherence of the presentation. I highlight individual scenes, note secondary images, observe characters... And draw parallels with what I experienced. Then I name by association the first thing that comes to mind and try to decipher the meaning of the dream. I like keeping a diary like this: thanks to it, I discover those sides of my personality that I didn’t even know about before.”
Resistance
“We all have terrible, wild, uncontrollable desires, as evidenced by our dreams.” These words do not belong to Freud, as one might think, but ancient philosopher Plato, but they gained fame thanks to the creator of psychoanalysis. He also explained why memory is so selective. “Sigmund Freud considered dreams to be a manifestation of repressed desires, mainly of a sexual nature, that are too disturbing for us to be conscious,” explains Madina Slutskaya.
The dream frames messages in fanciful images to protect us from knowledge that could undermine our self-image. But sometimes such protection is not enough. “Consciousness is able to resist, rejecting incoming information, and then we forget our dream entirely,” says Madina Slutskaya. “And the good news is that a dream can repeat its message in different forms.”
The ambiguity of dream images allows us to read the meanings gradually and recognize only what we are ready to perceive now.
Madina Slutskaya, Jungian psychotherapist:“When you wake up, do not get up immediately, allow yourself to lie down for a while... Our dreams continue to live in such a “dream” state of consciousness. Don't make any special efforts trying to remember the dream. Just pay close attention to the images that come to you. Write them down. It is convenient if the notebook lies next to the bed so that it can be easily reached by simply extending your hand. Turning to these records will allow you to see the beauty, wisdom and diversity of unconscious images, motives and aspirations of your own soul.”
Michel Billard, neurologist:“If you really want to remember your dream, then ask someone close to you to wake you up between three and four o’clock in the morning, when sleep is especially deep and the duration of dreams can reach 20 minutes. Your partner can also check to see if you are dreaming. To do this, look at your eyelids and fingertips: if they twitch slightly, it means you are dreaming.”
Every morning it’s the same: as soon as you open your eyes, night dreams disappear without a trace, leaving only the sweet aftertaste of memories of other worlds. We'll tell you why this happens.
In a dream, we manage to overcome all imaginable and unimaginable obstacles, visit unknown countries and even fall in love, but, as a rule, when we wake up, the night’s adventures dissolve in consciousness. So how do our dreams arise, and why are they so completely erased from memory, and is it possible to retain a dream in memory with all the details? Experts have conducted a lot of research and are now one step closer to the truth.
Why do we fall asleep
Surely you have noticed more than once that the moment of “falling asleep”, when you disconnect from reality, is impossible to track. So how do we fall asleep anyway? Scientists from Sweden came to the conclusion that we fall asleep at the moment when the brain centers that were at rest during the daytime come into operation. And American experts noticed that important role plays a lack of daylight, which translates our The biological clock at night due to the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone. In any case, experts from different parts of the world have not come to a consensus. There is even an opinion that a person falls asleep due to the accumulation of certain metabolic products in the body during the day.
Everyone sleeps the same
All people sleep absolutely equally, and absolutely equally cannot do without sleep. We forget dreams because our brain is like a computer that has an incompatibility with certain files - a coding problem; let's say the same thing when we cannot upload some non-standard video format to YouTube.
According to recent research, all our dreams, even if we feel them to be very long or several of them per night, last very long. short term in reality - a few seconds before waking up (not necessarily in the morning, you can wake up in the middle of the night). That is, all our flights in dreams, incredible journeys and great loves fly by in the present time with incredible speed. This circumstance prevents us from remembering our dreams in all details, and sometimes completely erases the picture from memory. Our brain is able to remember a maximum of three dreams a week, and even then very vaguely.
According to research, those dreams that we remember most vividly reflect our real dreams. What is a dream? final decision Scientists have not found it, but by default, sleep can be called the encoding of everyday information and dreams into our subconscious.
Two phases of sleep
During sleep, our body, like a global machine, begins to work in a completely different mode. For example, the sleep state is divided into two phases: slow and fast. Slow makes up from 75 to 80% of our total rest time; during this period, processes usually active during wakefulness slow down, the heart beats less often, breathing becomes rarer, activity decreases digestive system, body temperature decreases. Moreover, the muscles also relax extremely - this process, by the way, can be noticed even before falling asleep - you've probably noticed how our limbs twitch from time to time. For the most part, athletes and dancers are subject to reflex movements - their muscles undergo much more during the day. heavy load than other, “ordinary” people.
As for the fast phase, here everything happens the other way around: the heart beat quickens, the pressure rises. Many scientists are sure that it is during the fast phase that our brain processes the information received over the past day. It must be said that we can have dreams in both the fast and slow phases, although they are very different from each other. In fast dreams, we see vivid, emotionally charged dreams, sometimes impossible to decipher - in other words, a set of pictures. But in the slow phase, dreams become much more meaningful, realistic, and as close as possible in content to the period of wakefulness, which is why, in slow sleep, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish dreams from reality. But if you wake up a person at the stage of REM sleep, he will, without a doubt, remember his dream in great detail. But in slow mode - no.
Where do our nightmares come from?
A nightmare is always bad, in other words, if you see it too often bad dreams, you can be sure that your body is giving you alarming signals. As a rule, systematic nightmares indicate neurosis, increased emotionality and other mental disorders. “Random” nightmares are a sign of overwork and stress. Unpleasant dreams can be dreamed in both fast and slow phases. The only thing is that being in fast phase, you, as a rule, can be aware that you are dreaming, you are dreaming a nightmare. Moreover, you are so aware of this that by an effort of will you can force yourself to wake up.
As for the slow phase, everything is much more complicated here. Since our dreams become more realistic during the slow period, our perception also changes, which means it is not always possible to persuade ourselves to wake up.
But the relatively good news is that you have already watched the lion's share of your nightmares. It turns out that children are much more susceptible to scary dreams than adults. Scientists have proven that from 3 to 8 years old, children have more nightmares than adults in their entire lives. And this is a reason to treat our children and their random night tears even a little more carefully.
Black and white dreams
It turns out that not all people can see colorful dreams. However, there are very few lucky people whose dreams are always monochrome. Studies conducted from 1915 to the fifties of the 20th century say that among sighted people, 12% dream exclusively in black and white. Since the 60s the picture has changed. Today, 4.4% of people see black and white dreams.
Some interesting facts
We only dream what we have seen. Sometimes completely unfamiliar faces appear in our dreams. In fact, no matter how paradoxical it may sound, in a dream we see only what we know. Just imagine - hundreds of people pass by us every day, and every face they see is imprinted in our subconscious - in reality, we will quickly forget “unnecessary” information, but in a dream, the brain may very well helpfully slip it to us.
All healthy people dream. All people (except perhaps people with serious mental changes) have dreams, however, according to research, men and women dream differently. Men mostly dream of representatives of their own sex, while women in their dreams see representatives of both sexes in approximately equal proportions.
Blind people also dream. If a person has lost his sight after birth, throughout his life he may dream of pictures “from past life“As for those who suffer from illness from the cradle, their dreams are filled with sounds, smells and tactile sensations.
Dreams prevent neurosis. Dreams are a reflection of our desires - both conscious and subconscious. It is dreams that help protect our nervous system. Relatively recently, a team of psychologists conducted an experiment: a group of volunteers were allowed to sleep eight hours a day, however, they were woken up whenever the period of dreams began. After a short time, the volunteers began to hallucinate in usual time days, get nervous for no reason, show aggression.
Mental disorders can be diagnosed using dreams. A few years ago popular magazine Neurology presented data that such mental illness, like Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia, make themselves felt in dreams long before their first real manifestation. The fact is that patients with these diseases, the cause of which lies in neurodegenerative disorders, constantly have nightmares, which are especially characterized by screams, blows, crying and groans that reign in the dream.
In this article we will figure out how to remember dreams. We all see them when we sleep, but for some reason, while some happily share their interesting dreams with others, others claim that they never dream. In fact, night visions come to them too, they just don’t remember them for some reason.
Why don't people remember dreams?
Scientists have long found out that a person can constantly forget about his dreams due to the characteristics of brain activity. In some individuals, the area at the border of the parietal and temporal cortex functions more strongly than in other members of the human race. It is the first category that remembers its dreams better and more often.
The other part of humanity, in which the mentioned part of the brain is not active enough, wakes up and does not remember that they dreamed anything. The former sleep lightly and can often, but the latter, on the contrary, have deep, calm and measured sleep.
Why remember dreams?
But really - why? Well, firstly, we spend no less than a third of our lives in a state of sleep. It’s somehow a shame that such a large piece of priceless existence ends up in absolute darkness. But dreams have the most direct impact on our emotional well-being after waking up. And this happens even if a person does not remember them. Pleasant dreams cause cheerfulness and upliftment, give self-confidence, but a dreamed nightmare, on the contrary, can last the whole day, a person will be in a depressed state and wondering why he got off on the wrong foot today.
In addition, the reasons for sleep can be different. Sometimes dream analysis helps to cope with psychological problems. Dreams can warn about something, they can be prophetic. It’s not for nothing that there are so many in the world various dream books. Great importance night dreams were given by: the founder of the system of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, the astrologer and predictor Nostradamus, and the world-famous scientist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev in a dream saw a table where all the chemical elements were harmoniously and clearly systematized. All he had to do was record his vision - and now we use the periodic table chemical elements Mendeleev to this day.
Dreams and reality
Real life and dreams are interconnected, and very closely. Whatever happens to a person in reality, sooner or later it is reflected in his dreams. This is a natural necessity of the consciousness and subconscious, the brain and the whole organism. The brain can be called a big bank of everything life decisions, which a person has ever accepted, a gigantic keeper of information about all words and actions, about the world around him. In a dream, when consciousness turns off, the subconscious has the opportunity to re-construct, correct and refine what is happening around.
Being the main character of his dream, a person gets the opportunity to learn better about his attitude towards the people around him and about their reciprocal attitude towards him. By capturing a vivid dream in our consciousness, we get a chance to understand the depth of our true capabilities. Therefore, it would be wrong to underestimate the importance of what the astral shows us.
Sleep phases
Before we start telling you how to remember dreams, we would like to explain a little about the structure of dreams. When a person sleeps, he experiences two stages of sleep - slow and fast sleep. Moreover, both alternate with each other and, in turn, are also divided into several phases. If so, his sleep always begins with the first, slow stage, which then passes into the second, fast stage. Long night sleep goes through many cycles, during which phases replace one another. Slow sleep occurs in four stages, or stages, of which the third and fourth are the deepest (by the way, they are also called delta sleep). In this phase, it can be difficult to wake a person; he is completely disconnected from the outside world and sees various scenes. However, when people wake up at this time, they rarely remember that they had a dream.
A completely different matter is the REM sleep phase. This stage is characterized by rapid eye movement. If a person wakes up at this time, then in most cases he will remember what he dreamed. An interesting fact is that the dream a second before waking up is the most vivid and is remembered for a very long time.
And now the most important part of our story begins. Do you want to know how to remember dreams? read carefully next list recommendations:
1. You need to go to bed as early as possible to get enough sleep. In the morning, with a fresh mind, it will be much easier to remember everything that happened in the dream.
2. Try to establish close contact with your unconscious self. If you persistently and clearly make it clear to your subconscious that you want to hear and understand everything that it wants to tell you, it may begin to respond.
3. What to do to remember a dream? Before falling asleep, try repeating to yourself the words: “I will definitely remember everything that I dream.”
4. You need to try to wake up several times a night. To do this, you can drink a lot of water before going to bed - in this case, the body itself will wake you up. In those moments when you wake up, it will be easiest to catch your dream and realize it.
5. When you wake up, you shouldn’t get up immediately. Try to enjoy the state of half-asleep a little, where dream and reality seem to be mixed with each other.
6. Avoid the alarm clock - this device can interfere with the memorization of the plot, because its sound rudely interrupts sleep and forces a person to abruptly switch to a state of wakefulness. We have our own biological clock inside, and if we set ourselves to wake up at 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning, then this will happen.
7. When you feel yourself waking up, try not to move immediately or open your eyes for a while. Lie still, focus on the images and visions that will arise in your head.
8. Record in your memory individual key images or moments of the dream. If you don’t remember the entire dream, then describe to yourself its fragments, feelings, mood.
9. Tell your loved ones about what you dreamed. Words will give night visions a more stable form and can lead to a chain of memories about their details.
10. Place a notepad with a pencil or pen on the nightstand next to the bed, and let there be a source of weak light nearby that can be easily turned on if necessary. Such light will not be able to drive away the dream completely, but it will allow you to write down what you just dreamed.
Keeping a dream journal
So, you have acquired a special notebook, on the pages of which you will check all the details of your night dreams. This is very important point! Do not rely on your memory, even if you have a dream so vivid that it seems impossible to forget it. After just a few hours, you may find that your memory has failed you again. So it is imperative to take notes, and this must be done immediately after waking up.
12 questions for a magazine questionnaire
In order to make working with the dream journal easier, we recommend using a special questionnaire prepared in advance. Just try to answer the following twelve questions as responsibly and honestly as possible every time:
1. What was your role in the dream (passive, active, aggressive, etc.)?
2. What emotions and feelings did you and the other participants experience in the dream?
3. Does the plot of the dream have anything to do with what is currently happening in your life?
4. Who were the heroes of your dream - relatives, friends or strangers? Try to remember everyone.
5. Were there any symbols (animals, house, gold, body of water, etc.) or unusual properties present in the dream? How could this relate to you specifically?
6. How this dream generally correlates with the characteristics of your personality?
7. What are the main events of the dream? It is very important to trace at least partially the logic of what is happening in order not only to subsequently understand how to remember dreams, but also to actually learn how to do it.
8. What things that happen in your dreams would you like to avoid?
9. Think about what actions or thoughts this vision pushes you to?
10. Did the dream cause any forgotten memories, does it have anything to do with the past?
11. Thanks to your dream, did you have any other questions that were not included in this questionnaire?
12. Do you think there was any meaning in the dream, what message was conveyed to you and why?
How to properly prepare for bed
When going to the kingdom of Morpheus, you need to maintain a clear mind, not clouded by alcohol, sleeping pills or too much fatigue. Lie on your back and try to completely relax. It's not so easy, we are under constant pressure muscle tension, and some muscle groups cannot relax even during sleep. Calm your breathing, let it be smooth and rhythmic. By the way, this is also an excellent recipe for insomnia. If there is someone who understands and loving person, ask him to make you a light one. You can put bunches of herbs under your pillow: thyme, rosemary, lavender.
Conscious dream
Here's a very important advice how to remember a dream: try to turn it into To do this, you need to have a strong intention. Give yourself the mindset that as soon as you feel like you are falling asleep, you will immediately try to look for your hands. If you master this technique, your dreams will be clearer and more memorable. This is the first step towards mastering technology lucid dreams, and it will be quite enough for you. Further practices are more dangerous and require the mandatory presence of an experienced mentor.
Ancient magical ritual
If you are not afraid of magical practices, then here is a description of a simple ritual that will help you achieve your goals. The necessary conditions performing this action: the presence of any musical instrument and the night is certainly from Thursday to Friday. Before you go to bed, you need to make one musical sound on the instrument and say the following: “Clarify my dream. What I see, I will remember.” And then add: “Reveal the hidden, suppress the empty.” After this, you can go to bed, lie down, remember the musical sound and repeat the magic spell in a whisper.
Conclusion
Now you know how to learn to remember dreams. But knowledge alone will not help you master this science; mandatory practice is needed. If you follow the simple tips given in our article every day, then gradually everything will start to work out.
Why don't we remember our dreams? This is also strange because dreams can be much more vivid and intense than everyday life. If some events that happen in a dream would happen to us in reality - for example, falling from a roof or romantic connection with a movie star - this story would definitely remain in our memory.
There are several theories that help understand why dreams fade from memory so quickly.
On the one hand, forgetting is a process necessary from an evolutionary point of view: for a caveman, a dream that he jumped off a cliff while running away from a lion would not have ended well.
We are accustomed to the past being organized chronologically, linearly. Dreams are chaotic, full of associations and illogical turns
Other evolutionary theory, developed by DNA discoverer Francis Crick, states: main function dreams - forgetting unnecessary memories, which accumulate in the brain over time.
We also forget dreams because it is unusual for us to remember what happened in the dream.
We are accustomed to our past being organized chronologically, linearly: first one thing happened, then another, a third... Dreams are chaotic, full of associations and random, illogical turns.
In addition, everyday life, the need to get up on an alarm clock and immediately rush to do things does not contribute to remembering - the first thing we think about (if we think at all) after waking up is: “Where to start, what should I do today?” Because of this, dreams dissipate like smoke.
What to do to remember a dream?
Before you go to bed, set two alarms: one to finally wake up, the other (musical) to focus on what you saw in your dream. The second one should ring a little earlier than the first.
1. Before going to bed, place a pen and a piece of paper on the nightstand near your bed. Or use the notebook app on your smartphone: write down everything you remember until you start to forget.
2. When the “musical” alarm clock rings and you reach for paper and pencil, try to move as little as possible.
3. Remember the feeling of the dream, its mood, write down what comes to mind. Do this in a free form, do not give events a sequence.
4. Keep a notepad nearby throughout the day: perhaps sleep will continue to “flirt” with us. Flirting dreams is a term coined by Arthur Mindell: dream shards can appear throughout the day or even several days, “teasing” us and our brain.
5. Once you learn to replay your dreams, it will be much easier for you to remember them.
Do you remember what you dreamed about last night? Do you often have memorable dreams? Some people seem to remember all of their dreams every night, while others rarely remember any dreams. What makes up these differences?
A recent study by a group of French neurologists may provide an explanation for this issue. The researchers selected two groups of participants: those who often recalled their dreams, and those who rarely recalled any dreams or did not remember them at all. Using a technique called PET scanning, the scientists monitored the participants' brain activity while they were awake and while they were asleep.
As researchers have found, during the period when our brain is in the shallow sleep phase, the most vivid and memorable dreams occur. During this period, two areas of the brain are most active: the temporo-parietal, and the medial prefrontal areas of the cortex in the frontal lobes.
So what does high activity in these areas mean? The authors offered several possible interpretations. Perhaps these differences reflect how our brains view dreams themselves. In particular, this may mean that people who frequently recall their dreams tend to have more exciting dreams.
Another explanation suggested by the study's authors is that people who remember their dreams more often than others are more likely to wake up more often during the night, which allows them to encode their dreams into memory (after all, memory usually "turns off" during sleep) .
Of course, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that only the most vivid and interesting dreams, it is also more likely that such dreams can awaken a person, which doubly strengthens them in our memory, and increases the likelihood of remembering them the next day. 
This explains why dreams that we have during light sleep are more likely to be remembered than those that occur during deep sleep. We can dream in any stage of sleep. But our dreams during light sleep tend to be vivid, whimsical, and memorable, while during other stages of sleep, dreams tend to be more boring and mundane. Because large areas of the brain remain active during shallow sleep rather than resting as they do during deep sleep, our dreams during this period are associated with sensations, memorable events, something exciting and evoking an emotional response. During such periods, we can also often see nightmares and frightening dreams, because they are also directly related to the work of the parts of the brain responsible for our emotions and sensations.
In addition, we are more likely to remember dreams from the light stage of sleep not only because they are stranger and more interesting, but because we are likely to wake up sooner after short stage, than after the stage of deep sleep, and the memory has time to fix them.
So, for people who complain that they don't remember their dreams, the good news is that they probably just have a very strong and healthy sleep. Therefore, if you cannot remember your dreams, do not be upset about this.
