Why do often we forget what we dreamt after waking up?
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In part, because your dreams don’t make as much sense as you think they do. Your brain has an area responsible for what is called reality checking. You see someone with three arms, your brain goes, “Whoa! That can’t be right, let’s take a closer look”. You do, realize it is really two people standing at a weird angle, and all is well.
While dreaming, reality checking is reduced. That’s why you can be an adult back in middle school, interact with dead relatives, or have to take a day off of work so you can go pitch for the Yankees, accepting it all without consciously questioning it. A dream will seem to make sense while you are dreaming, that there is some logic holding it together, but only because you aren’t looking at it too hard. When you wake up and try to remember, your brain and its fully functional reality checker want to put it into some kind of rational narrative. There isn’t one, so you are left with disconnected memory fragments and the impression there was something deeper there you are now missing.
It has to do with the way memories are stored.
In the case of dreams, they’re not. There’s very little purpose to storing dreams–so all we get is the little bit of short-term memory for most dreams, with the occasional dream being encoded into mid-term or long-term memory.
Because your brain wasn’t writing it to memory. We don’t really know what dreams are, but last I checked the prevailing theory was that they’re a result of the “conscious” part of our brain trying to translate all the signals running through it into some kind of sensible image. Dreams are a side effect of brain activity, so to speak, and our memory isn’t particularly interested in recording that. In order to record it, the brain would have to acknowledge that it’s constructing a perceived reality and then record what that is, but most of the time the brain doesn’t know that, so it can only write down a few snippets that are particularly strong when you first awaken.
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