While I sometimes question the existence of dreams, the reality is they have been and always will be a factor. For some, they stimulate their writing, aspirations, mood, and some use them as a basis of what they believe their “previous life” was. But what happens if you don’t remember your dreams? Does that mean your future and past are hopeless?

I remember sleeping at home and constantly being woken up in the middle of the night because my younger brother had a nightmare and needed to talk about it with someone. These same nightmares distort his reality while I can’t even recount the last time I remembered a dream. How can two siblings be so different in regards to their ability to recount their dreams?

Researches were just as curious and decided to conduct a survey and record the electrical activity in the brains of 36 people while the participants listened to background tunes, and occasionally heard their own first name. The electrical activity was measured both awake and asleep. While asleep the groups showed similar changes in brain activity in response to hearing their names but when awake high recallers showed a more sustained decrease in a brain wave.

The conclusion from the experiment was that high recallers may be more reactive to stimuli which could make them wake up more easily. High recallers tend to wake up more frequently than low recallers which would make sense. They are able to remember their dreams more because they are more conscious throughout their dreaming experience. But why are people’s brains trained so differently? What makes someone a high recaller from a low recaller? There is so much more to understand about the dreaming process which could open endless doors to understanding the human brain more.

The experiment results from above aren’t as reliable as I would like. There should be a lot more subjects in a given experiment to reduce the lurking variable. Third variables are not measured as well- are the subjects interested in their dreams, anxious, or sleep deprived? Could age and gender play a role? Reverse causation is not ruled out either, does brain activity determine whether or not you remember your dreams? I’m left with so many questions and not many answers.

L. Strumpell, dream researcher, had several hypotheses as to why we don’t remember dreams but his strongest theory was that we traditionally learn and remember both by association and repetition. Since our dreams are so fast and vague to begin with how can we possibly remember all of them throughout our sleep? Based on Strumpbell’s theory I feel that our ability to remember dreams parallels to our ability to learn information in general.

I was hoping that after investigating the process of dreams I would better understand why some can dream better than others but so far there have not been any good enough studies. Even though there’s a lack of explanations, if you are eager to remember your dreams you can do several different things. This article suggests to “set your alarm to go off every hour and a half, keep a pad and pencil next to your bed, and try to wake up slowly to remain within the “mood” of your last dream.”