Dream Research
Why some people remember every dream and others remember none
Everyone dreams. Recall varies enormously between people, and the differences are measurable in brain activity, personality, and the simple question of how you wake up.
People who say they never dream are almost always people who never recall dreaming. Woken from REM sleep in a laboratory, they report dreams at rates approaching those of high recallers — the dreams are happening, and the memory of them is not surviving the transition to waking.
Recall frequency varies from several dreams a week to essentially none, and the variation is stable enough to be treated as a trait.
What distinguishes high recallers
Perrine Ruby's group in Lyon has done much of the work here, comparing habitual high and low recallers.
High recallers show more intra-sleep wakefulness — roughly twice as much time awake during the night. Since dream content appears to require a period of wakefulness to be encoded into long-term memory, brief awakenings act as recording opportunities. This is the most robust finding, and it carries an uncomfortable implication: recalling many dreams may be a marker of lighter, more fragmented sleep.
High recallers also show greater spontaneous activity in the temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex during both sleep and wakefulness. The temporoparietal junction is involved in attention orienting and in the processing of self-relevant information, and greater reactivity there may make the sleeping brain more likely to produce the arousals that permit encoding.
And they show larger evoked responses to their own name during sleep — a more reactive brain generally.
Dream memory is extraordinarily fragile. Estimates suggest most dream content is lost within minutes of waking. What preserves it is being woken directly from REM — most likely in the last third of the night — and not moving or opening the eyes immediately. Lying still and letting the dream come back before getting up dramatically improves recall, and it is the single most effective technique available.
Other factors
Personality. Openness to experience correlates with dream recall across studies, as does absorption — the tendency to become deeply engaged in imaginative experience. Thin boundaries, in Ernest Hartmann's terminology, describe people whose categories are permeable and who recall more dreams.
Interest and attitude. This is partly circular but real: people who value dreams pay attention on waking and therefore recall more. Simply asking people to keep a dream diary increases their recall, often substantially, within a fortnight.
Age. Recall declines through adulthood.
Sleep timing. Waking naturally, especially later in the night when REM periods are longest, favours recall. An alarm that drags you out of deep sleep at six is close to the worst condition.
Medication. Anything suppressing REM — alcohol, many antidepressants, some blood pressure drugs — reduces dream recall. Withdrawal from them produces vivid dreaming through REM rebound.
Keeping a dream journal, if you want to
The technique is unglamorous and effective.
- Decide the night before that you intend to remember. Intention has a measurable effect.
- Keep something to write on within reach, or a voice recorder. Getting out of bed to find a pen loses the dream.
- Do not move on waking. Stay in position, eyes closed, and let it return. Changing posture appears to disrupt retrieval.
- Write immediately, and write anything — a single image, a feeling, a fragment. Fragments frequently unspool into whole dreams once you start.
- Include the emotion, which is often the most stable element and the most informative.
- Record every morning, including mornings with nothing. The habit is what raises recall.
Most people go from occasional to near-daily recall within two to three weeks. Some find the increase unwelcome, particularly if the dreams are unpleasant, and stopping the journal reverses it.
Whether it is worth doing
Two honest reasons and one caution.
The continuity hypothesis — that dream content tracks waking preoccupation — means a journal accumulates a rough record of what has actually been occupying you, which is often not what you would have said. Recurring themes are informative in that limited sense.
And dreams are a strange, free, nightly experience most people simply discard. Attending to them is defensible on the same grounds as reading fiction.
The caution: increased recall means increased recall of nightmares too. For someone with distressing dreams, deliberately amplifying recall is not obviously a good idea, and the relevant intervention is imagery rehearsal therapy rather than journalling.
