How many people remember dreams

This finding is yet another piece of evidence that shows brain connectivity is somehow important in dream recall. But having more white matter may not just help you remember your dreams, it may also promote dream creation. As prominent neuropsychologist Mark Solms found in the early s , people who developed rare, brain-damaging lesions within the white matter of the medial prefrontal cortex reported that they stopped dreaming altogether.

Another interpretation is that they stopped dreaming. But for most people, much of dream recall boils down to individual characteristics — some within our control, and some not.

Scientists also know that women , on average, are more likely to remember their dreams than men. Teenage boys are less encouraged to speak about their dreams or feelings. But both sexes may notice that their ability to remember our dreams seems to fade with age. As we grow older, our sleep patterns tend to change. Older people get less slow wave sleep, often referred to as deep sleep.

Between the ages of 20 and 60, deep sleep decreases at a rate of 2 percent per decade. But the amount of REM sleep, when our most memorable dreams seem to occur, stays about the same. Do age-related changes make much of a difference when it comes to dream recall? Vallat said probably not. Instead, day-to day stressors like deadlines, bills and appointments often take precedence over our dream worlds. And people may miss out on REM sleep by cutting sleep short.

People who use alcohol and THC may also tend to forget dreams, as these substances are known to suppress dream-rich REM sleep, Vallat said. A study published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences found that forgetting dreams may also be due to changes in levels of certain neurotransmitters, specifically acetylcholine and norepinephrine, during REM sleep. Yet another study, published in Frontiers of Psychology , found a link between dream recall and the brain matter density of the medial prefrontal cortex MPFC.

Participants with higher white matter density reported higher dream recall. People who are under the age of 25 rarely report dreaming in black and white. This idea is supported by an older study, which found that people in the s rarely reported dreaming in color. Researchers have found some differences between men and women when it comes to the content of their dreams.

In several studies, men reported dreaming about weapons significantly more often than women did, while women dreamed about references to clothing more often than men.

Another study showed that men's dreams tend to have more aggressive content and physical activity, while women's dreams contain more rejection and exclusion, as well as more conversation than physical activity. Women tend to have slightly longer dreams that feature more characters. When it comes to the characters that typically appear in dreams, men dream about other men twice as often as they do about women, while women tend to dream about both sexes equally.

Many think that when a sleeping dog wags its tail or when a sleeping cat swats its paws, it is dreaming.

While it's hard to say for sure whether this is truly the case, researchers believe that it's likely that most animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, do go through sleep stages, including REM and non-REM, which means they do indeed dream.

Animals might not experience dreams in the same way as humans, however. In other words, they may not wake up, remember images, and attach a storyline to it. A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming even though you're still asleep. Lucid dreaming is thought to be a combination state of both consciousness and REM sleep, during which you can often direct or control the dream content.

Researchers say that people can use various techniques to learn how to lucid dream, including "mnemonic induction of lucid dreams" MILD and "senses initiated lucid dreams" SSILD , which involve waking up after five hours and repeating a phrase like "I will remember my dreaming," or focusing on the stimuli sights, sounds, sensations in your sleep environment, respectively.

Approximately half of all people can remember experiencing at least one instance of lucid dreaming, and some individuals are able to have lucid dreams quite frequently. Over a period of more than 40 years, researcher Calvin S.

Hall, PhD, collected over 50, dream accounts from college students. These reports were made available to the public during the s by Hall's student William Domhoff.

The dream accounts revealed that many emotions are experienced during dreams. There are several factors that can impact the emotional content of dreams, including anxiety, stress, and certain medications. One study found that external stimuli, including good and bad smells, can play a role in positive and negative dreams. The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety, and negative emotions, in general, are much more common than positive ones.

In one study of people who have been blind since birth, researchers found that they still seemed to experience visual imagery in their dreams, and they also had eye movements that correlated to visual dream recall.

Although their eye movements were fewer during REM than the sighted participants of the study, the blind participants reported the same dream sensations, including visual content.

REM sleep is characterized by paralysis of the voluntary muscles. The phenomenon is known as REM atonia and prevents you from acting out your dreams while you're asleep. Basically, because motor neurons are not stimulated, your body does not move.

In some cases, this paralysis can even carry over into the waking state for as long as 10 minutes, a condition known as sleep paralysis.

When one of the scientific mysteries surrounding dreams closes, it seems, another opens. Photo: Jose de Ribera No one knows exactly why we dream, or whether our dreams hold any meaning.

IBT explains: "High dream recallers" have more activity in the temporo-parietal junction, which the researchers believe may allow the dreamer to focus more attention on external stimuli, promoting intrasleep wakefulness, which means dreams are better embedded into the sleeper's memory. Post a Comment. Remembering the dream the next day may affect mood and cause even more stress or anxiety. For most of my childhood, I would watch myself in third person, almost like a movie.

Then, one day, I started experiencing the dreams through my own eyes, and it never reverted. This could be a sign of my brain continuing its storytelling in my sleep.

Though being able to remember dreams can sometimes be a sign of something else, such as a health condition or medication.

Alarm clocks, and irregular sleep schedules can result in abrupt waking during dream or REM sleep, and thus result in recall of dreams. What about those dreams that are so intense or disturbing that they literally wake you out of your sleep? You may find yourself in a sweaty panic, your heart racing, and sitting up in bed totally confused about what just happened.

People who have post-traumatic stress syndrome PTSD may have vivid nightmares that involve flashbacks or replays of the trauma, either directly or symbolically. These can affect sleep quality and mood the next day. Also, excessive fatigue during the daytime may be a sign of sleep issues that require a person to seek help. If at any point your dreams, or remembering your dreams, is causing you stress or anxiety, you should consider speaking with a doctor.

Though I do feel more tired at times when waking up from a detailed dream, remembering them keeps things interesting — not to mention, it gives me some great story ideas. Aside from the time I dreamed about snakes for an entire week.

Sarah Fielding is a New York City-based writer.