Why do we forget most or sometimes all of what we dreamed about shortly after we wake up?
In: Biology
Honestly we’re not entirely sure.
It seems like dreams are a tool our minds use to organize and reflect on our memories.
And that memory and sleep are closely related. Counting sheep kind of turns off your memory which can help you go to sleep, sort of like putting it into an indexing mode.
Another view is that dreams are how our subconscious minds process reality, like our prehistoric animal minds. No language or math, just imagery and sensation. Sunlight for love, sunset for death, etc.
And when we wake up, our conscious minds assert themselves over our subconscious, and so the thoughts of the subconscious vanish with it, leaving only trace memories of images we don’t consciously understand.
Sleep, memory, and consciousness, are all concepts that science still doesn’t have a perfect grasp on.
Even our sense of time gets involved in a puzzling way. Ever have a dream about hearing a knock on your door and then some other things happen over time, but you wake upto an actual knock on your door? How did your dream seem so long if it was triggered by a knock just a moment ago?
We’re just not sure. We know some details here and there but the whole picture eludes us.
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