Ananya Kulkarni (Week 14) - Remembering Dreams
A dream is a series or collection of sensations, thoughts, and images that occur in a person's mind when they are sleeping. Some people may say that they are a window to the subconscious mind. Others say that they are just a result of the brain activity that takes place while we sleep. Some dreams can be very vivid or scary and are often forgotten the next day. It is a known fact that most dreams are forgotten over the course of the night. Personally, I could probably count all of the dreams I have ever remembered for more than a few days on my fingers. So if dreams are not usually memorable, what makes us remember dreams, and what makes us forget them?
In an article I recently read, it mentioned that there may be a simple explanation for why we do not remember dreams. It may be due to the brain's sorting of essential and nonessential information while we are asleep. This theory suggests that while our brain processes the information, the nonessential information is eliminated and the essential information is moved from short-term to long-term memory. Another theory suggests that people's brains may block out dreams on purpose so that they cannot be recalled the next day. This usually happens when the dream activity is very intense and cannot be distinguished as reality or a dream. Thus, the brain tries to hide and get rid of this experience to clear up the confusion between our waking experiences and dreams.
With all this said, brain activity can also help some people remember their dreams. A region in your brain called the temporoparietal junction can put you in a state of intra-sleep wakefulness which allows the brain to encode and remember dreams. Other things such as amount and quality of sleep, stress, or level of creativity can also affect how much of a dream is remembered.
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Hi Ananya, I found your discussion on the topic of dreams to be very informative. Oftentimes, I cannot recall any of my dreams; even if I do remember them I forget them in a matter of minutes. However, some of my dreams feel very real sometimes, and it is in times like these that I am grateful that my brain forgets these dreams. Dreams are an interesting topic, and I learned a lot about them from your blog.
ReplyDeleteHi Ananya,
ReplyDeleteI forget most of my dreams as well. It is really irritating sometimes because I will have the craziest dream and wake up in the middle of the night thinking that I am going to tell all my friends the next day, but then I forget the whole dream. Lat night actually I had two nightmares in a row! I do not remember exactly what it was about, but I know it had tons of monsters. Dreams happen for a variety of reasons, but I still do not know exactly why or how we forget them.
Hi Ananya, the entire concept and phenomena behind dreams will never cease to phase me. And, a lot of times, we have these crazy dreams that cannot be remembered because we forget them a few minutes right after we wake up. This has led people (like me) to write our dreams down, so that we do not forget what happened in it. It's crazy how the strangest things can happen within the span of seconds, yet we wake up and move on with the rest of our day as if it never happened.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this fascinating explanation of dreams! I once read that the mind is unable to invent unique faces in dreams and that everybody featured in our imaginations is somebody we either passed in-person, saw on TV, or know personally. I am not sure how scientists have discovered this--can they read peoples’ minds? This is puzzling, to say the least.
ReplyDeleteHi Ananya, thank you for this explanation of dreams. It has always been strange to me why we can remember some dreams and not others. dreams are pieces of our memories stitched together in a strange semi-logical sequence. Sometimes we can understand them, and others we cannot. Some we know are dreams while others feel so real. It is always interesting to learn more about dreams and how they work.
ReplyDeleteHi Ananya, dreams have always been an enigmatic experience for me, so your post was very clarifying in that regard. It is nice to know that our brains are hard at work, sorting through information while we are sleeping. That fact is probably partially responsible for why so many people emphasize the importance of sleep.
ReplyDeleteHey Ananya, this was a really interesting look on dreams. It is a lot of stunning information i had no clue of previously and it is interesting to know know this. I feel like dreams are something that is only ever meant to be temporary and to your point of the brain sorting them they have no need to be remembered and are better left unremembered because it gives sleep contents and fills those spaces with something to do so we can manipulate our own sense of thought effectively allowing us to rest. This also comes with the thought that if we were able to remember all of our dreams it would take the specialness out of dreams and effectively just make theme something to fill time which they are but the sense of their fleeting splendor gives them more value.
ReplyDeleteHi Ananya, I did not realize why we forget specific dreams instead of all of them. I thought that some nights we forget all the dreams we have. Your blog helped me understand why we sometimes do not remember some dreams. Also, if we get rid of too intense dreams, then why do I still have very intense dreams. I can only imagine how wild our dreams can get because some nightmares or dreams we have can be very crazy.
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