Within the scientific community, dreams are still something of a mystery. Further complicating matters is the fact that everyone dreams, but some people never remember their subconscious escapades. However, improvements in brain imaging and recent physiological studies have brought us one step closer to answering the question of why some people remember their dreams more than others.
Barrett shared a few of the factors that can affect your dream recall. Women, on average, recall more dreams than men. Alternatively, women might be more cognizant of their dreams because they tend to be more interested in dreams in general. In other words: There are plenty of women with low dream recall and plenty of men with high dream recall. As we get older, it often gets harder to recall our dreams. Your ability to remember dreams improves in late childhood and adolescence, and tends to peak in your twenties, Barrett says.
After that point, people often experience a gradual drop-off in dream recall. However, there are exceptions, and people sometimes experience the opposite. And brief periods of awakenings — around two minutes — is enough time for dreams to be encoded into long term memory, the paper explained. When it comes to intellectual gymnastics, grey matter drives performance. Gray matter makes up about half of our brains, with white matter making up the other half.
If you think of a brain as a computer, gray matter would represent the information processing systems. And white matter would act as the cables that connect these different components together, allowing brain communication to flow.
Vallat and a research team found that people who frequently remember dreams have more white matter in a region of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region linked with processing information about oneself. 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. Shady Rose , an artist in Washington, D. On a recent Sunday morning, Rose had just woken up and a dream from the previous night was still fresh on their mind.
The dream started in media res, Rose recounted. This sort of detailed, sensory recall is common for Rose. A lot of their dreams sound like post-apocalyptic movies. There was one recurring dream series, for instance, in which the world had ended and Rose was part of a group trying to preserve human knowledge. In different dreams, they had to perform different missions, like going to the seed bank or saving books from the Library of Congress.
Rose said they feel like they live two lives, of equal proportion: a dream life and a waking life. Rose offered a few speculations about why they might remember their dreams so vividly. For one, they were raised in a deeply mystic religion from Ghana, called the Akan, or Akom, tradition. Rose believes their spiritual upbringing made them more open to the surreal, or more willing to question perceptions of reality.
They also suspect their sharp dream recall has to do with how their mind works generally. And I think that sort of transforms into, in my dreams, generating that much detail. Others remember just a few fuzzy details, or nothing at all. Why is that? Raphael Vallat , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, looked into this question.
Using fMRI and PET scans, he compared the brain activity of high dream recallers — people who remember their dreams every day — with low recallers, who never remember their dreams. The default mode network helps us view and make sense of ourselves. For example, it facilitates episodic memory, or the long-term recollection of specific events and experiences. Your memories of your first day of school, your first kiss, or a powerful conversation you had with a friend are all episodic memories.
His team found the default mode network was more active in high dream recallers, not just when they were asleep, but also when they were awake. These findings add to a growing body of research that suggests dreams play a role in memory consolidation.
Probably not. Scientists know that daydreaming is important in memory consolidation. Still, tons of people are captivated by their dreams, and really want to remember them.
Dean practices Jungian analysis , which is based on the ideas of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. He also runs a weekly dream group in Philadelphia.
0コメント