We are not all equal when it comes to sleep and the dreams that fill our nights. Why do we forget the majority of our dreams while others remember them in great detail?
Perhaps you wake up with the feeling of having experienced an extraordinary adventure during the night, more or less strange or unpleasant. A scenario so far-fetched that you often wonder what your dream could reveal about your subconscious… But sometimes, you simply don’t remember anything, as if you hadn’t dreamed for a single second. However, everyone dreams, every night.
If you are the type who has no memory of your dreams, don’t panic! This is completely normal, and you are far from alone. The majority of our dreams are distressingly banal. So much so that the MCH neurons – those which produce the hormone concentrating melanin, involved in the control of sleep and appetite –, located in the hypothalamus, are responsible for “sorting out” all the information that we accumulate, dreams included. At least this is the conclusion of a study published in September 2019.
These neurons, which are activated especially during paradoxical sleep – a phase of a few minutes which repeats every 90 minutes, during which we dream – are capable of differentiating information important to the human psyche from that of less interest. The first are then stored in our unconscious, while the others are simply erased from our memory.
The same goes for dreams. When they are deemed uninteresting by the neurons, they do not send them to the memory headquarters and simply erase them. But don’t worry if you never remember your dreams! This does not mean, however, that they have no interest. The neurons responsible for sorting during paradoxical sleep just believe that the memories of the day before are worth more than the dream, according to the researchers’ conclusions.
To summarize, remembering a dream in detail involves two conditions: it must occur towards the end of sleep time – when the REM sleep phase is longer – and it must be interesting enough to be maintained in memory. If you really want to remember them, it’s better to put a notebook and a pen on your bedside table so that you can write down your nocturnal adventures as soon as you wake up, while some traces of them remain in your memory.