Why do we forget most or sometimes all of what we dreamed about shortly after we wake up?
In: Biology
Think of your mind like a computer, with 2 different types of storage. You’ve got your short term memory, which is your PC’s RAM, and your long term memory, which is your hard drive/SSD. When you wake up, your long term memory takes a minute or so to crank up, so the short term memory can’t save to it the way it normally does.
If your dream is especially memorable, and you fixate on it and think about it for several minutes after you wake up, you’re much more likely to remember it. This is also why having a notebook to record your dreams can be helpful, to write them down the moment you wake up.
That said, there is research to suggest that dreams are just your brain reorganizing information in your memory, and nothing is more boring than listening to someone else talk about a dream they had, so there’s not much practical purpose to keeping a record.
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