In class, we discussed various anxiety disorders, which are characterized by feelings of excessive or unrealistic anxiety or fearfulness, regarding either future events or current environmental stimuli.  I’m all too familiar with anxiety disorders, for both my brother and I have been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or GAD.  GAD is characterized by persistent and uncontrollable anxiety. The anxiety is often brought on by common, everyday matters, but often the cause of the anxiety is unable to be determined.  My brother was diagnosed with this disorder much more recently, and at a much later age than I was.  He was diagnosed within the last year, at the age of 24, while I was diagnosed six years ago, at the age of 13.  Incidentally, both of us were diagnosed not only with GAD but also with a neurodevelopmental disorder: him with Attention Deficit Disorder, and me with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Obviously everyone has anxiety now and then, for various reasons.  Usually though, when the stressor passes, the anxiety fades and you return to a state of contentedness.  GAD, on the other hand, is much harder to deal with than simple anxiety over an upcoming test or a bad roommate.  It takes a normal amount of anxiety, intensifies it, removes any reasonable cause, and leaves you to fester in it for months at a time.  So much anxiety for so long really takes a toll on a person as well.  People with Generalized Anxiety Disorder often suffer simultaneously from restlessness, fatigue, irritability, trembling, twitching, being easily startled, trouble sleeping, sweating, nausea, shortness of breath, and rapid heartbeat, all symptoms I can personally attest to.  These symptoms are usually either constant or unusually common.  The fact of the matter is, people with GAD are just really stressed, all the time, for no reason.

Left untreated, the extreme stress brought on by this anxiety disorder can lead to other problems like depression, panic attacks, drug abuse, and the like.  Truly, if a person with GAD can’t manage their anxiety, they’ll be crushed beneath it.  I myself spent practically all of middle school in a depressed slump, complete with persistent panic attacks. However, after six years of therapy, anti-anxiety medications, and relaxation techniques, I’ve managed to reduce my anxiety to a reasonable level and am quite capable of maintaining that level.  It’s not uncommon for me to suffer what I call an “anxiety spike” with absolutely no provocation, but even then I can keep the anxiety under control and return it to where I want it to be.  Still, it took me six years to get to this point, which should indicate just how difficult GAD can be to cope with, especially when in conjunction with other disorders, be they psychological or neurodevelopmental in nature.  My brother, diagnosed with GAD only recently, is obviously not faring as well as I am at the moment.  Overall, I can say that Generalized Anxiety Disorder is an extremely unpleasant condition, and though it is certainly possible to cope with the anxiety, learning to do so is a long, stressful process.  However, coping is imperative, lest one with GAD risk more serious problems resulting from the intense and prolonged anxiety.

In class, we learned that there are two types of memories: implicit and explicit memories.  Implicit memories are those of tasks that we learned, and can remember, how to do.  For instance, we can remember how to tie our shoes or ride a bike, even if we can’t put the procedure into words so easily.  Explicit memories, on the other hand, can be put into words.  These memories can be divided further into two categories: semantic memories are the facts we know, and episodic memories are the personal experiences that we remember.  However, there are things that some of us can remember that do not fall into any of these categories.  What types of memories, then, are the dreams that we can remember?

Dreams obviously aren’t tasks we’ve learned how to do, nor are they facts that we know, so they cannot be qualified as implicit or semantic memories.  The last type is episodic memory, but dreams never really happened, so would they qualify as episodic memories?  I wouldn’t think so, but then again, although we didn’t actually experience that which occurred during a dream, our brains did.  The brain itself creates, and subsequently processes, the images, sounds, emotions, and sensations that occur in dream, and thus, can probably remember them just as it can anything else.

Why, then, do we remember so few of our dreams?  We have many dreams during each night, but we only remember the last one we had before waking.  However, we often can’t even remember the last dream we had any particular night.  It feels as if we didn’t even have a dream that night.  If the brain remembers dreams like it remembers anything else, then this isn’t entirely surprising. If we remembered all of the experiences that have ever happened to us, our brains would be complete messes!  It seems that the same holds true for remembering dreams.  Sometimes, we can vaguely remember, for a short amount of time, the dream from the night before.  Once we get up, however, the vague memories slip away completely.  This seems akin to how our short-term memory functions.  Once we stop thinking about something in STM for a bit, it just disappears from our minds.  Then, occasionally, there are those dreams that we seem to remember pretty clearly for quite a long time.

When you consider the types of dreams one tends to remember, however, it becomes fairly clear why some stick out so clearly in our mind.  They may be nightmares or particularly ridiculous dreams.  Considering that, it seems that we remember certain dreams in the same way we remember certain incidents in our lives.  Nightmares invoke fear, and thus, just like real-life events that have made us feel scared, stick out in our minds.  As for those particularly nonsensical dreams that often stick out in our minds as well, our tendency to remember those probably stem from the sheer novelty of the dream.  This is similar to real life, as we can often remember things that have happened that were particularly different or unusual.

All in all, it seems that, although we never experienced our dreams, our brains act as if we did, and treat them quite similarly to real experiences, in terms of storing them in our memories.  It disregards those that are not deemed “important” enough.  If we wake up in the middle of a dream, it’s as though its contents are put into short term memory, and will be forgotten completely if not attended to.  Then, those dreams that we do really remember, are often either emotion-provoking or novel, factors that often lead to remembering particular real events quite clearly.  Quite intriguing, that we remember things that never happened in the same way we remember those that actually did, and can still tell the difference.