LogFAQs > #971119783

ANAKAfire posted...

If it helps, I reccomend writing down your dreams. It makes it so you remember details and can recall them easier. I try to do it the moment I wake up from a dream or whenever it all comes back to me. If I were to wait before writing it down, I'd forget and the dream would be lost forever. I lost a whole lot of dreams that way, all that remains was the fact they were interesting.

You lose hundreds every night you never even realize you miss - you really only remember dreams you're still in the middle of when you wake up abruptly.

When you sleep and dream the long-term memory functions of your brain are turned off (in the same way your body sort of shuts down muscle control, which is why you get things like sleepwalking and sleep paralysis when it doesn't work quite right). When you wake up the long-term memory storage sort of starts to boot up again, but the dream you just had is only in your short-term memory at that point, and short-term memory only lasts for about 30 seconds before it clears.

If you write in a dream journal immediately when you wake up, or if you sort of start trying to remember everything that happened in your dream and kind of repeat it to yourself, what you're doing is shifting those details into your long-term storage so you can remember it later.

The irony is, no one ever really remembers a dream at all - it's literally impossible. What you're actually remembering is your attempt to remember the dream. You're remembering your own thoughts about the dream, not the dream itself.

The human brain is a crazy thing.