Why do dreams fade from memory so quickly?

My completely unbased theory on this is based on the idea that dreams are a side-effect of your brain processing things. Since they’re just a side effect, your brain isn’t likely to produce memories of them. However, doing something—like writing it down—reinforces the memory forming the memory.

While there are several attempts to explain why this is so, none of them seem complete or correct to me. The truth is scientists do not really know.

Psychologists associate dreams with unconscious or offline processing, which means that if dreams are associated with the unconscious, there is no mechanism for storing them in memory.

It is so far an unknown in the scientific world.

There was a very recent CalTech study that looked at the communication between neurons of the hyppocampus, where memories are formed, and the neocortex, where they are likely stored. For memories to be transfered to storage for later recall requires a near synchronization of the firings between the neurons in the two areas, with the neocortical neurons firing milliseconds after those of the hyppocampus.

The study monitored the timing in the brains of sleeping rats and found that this kind of synchronization happens in the slow-wave cycle of sleep (which makes memory consolidation possible), but was entirely absent during REM sleep, when most dreaming takes place. So during REM sleep, the transition to storage can’t occur.

Nobody knows. Keep writing the good ones down.

I still remember some startling dreams from years ago. They were allegedly about catastrophic events. Last night’s one is gone.

I think a lot of these answers really touch on the truth. Here’s my theory, and I’m not in any way a scientist or a student of this phenomenon, but here’s my two cents nonetheless. Your brain uses dreams to sort things out…your brain is basically an organic supercomputer and what it’s really doing when it dreams is to calculate things…kind of like when you shut down your computer and it installs the updates. If you think of your brain like a computer, think of it like the computer update or processing something to give you a result.

In the case of your computer, when you shut it down, when you come back to it, what you want to see is the computer updated with the latest functionality. Or if you are having it calculate something, when it’s done, what you are interested in, what has meaning to you is the result. Now, your computer (as well as your brain while dreaming) made millions of calculations, there is a great deal of information that your computer had internally that you never get to see, nor do you really have any interest in seeing…it has no value to you how the computer got from point a to point b, you just need to operate at point b from now on.

Your brain is the same thing…these dreams are its internal processors going through millions of permutations, working things out. When you wake up with a fresh perspective on something, what you care about is that fresh perspective, you don’t really care how you got from where you were yesterday to where you were today, well, at least not in any way that couldn’t be described as “trivial”...the actual permutations have no meaning and no use in your conscious mind, and therefore they remain relegated to the processors, i.e. your unconscious mind.

But because the brain is part of you, you can’t help but retain some of that awareness of the unconscious mind’s workings on waking up. It’s kind of like the restarting process for your computer…you see the title screen, some of that is still there, you are still coming out of a sleep state and therefore you still have the ability to bring some of your unconscious mind forth. If you are passive about it, it recedes and probably all that data is like RAM, it’s thrown out the next time your mind has to make some calculations in the unconscious. But, if you take ACTION, by accessing that data, and writing it down, then it’s kind of like copying the files from your unconscious mind, where the cache will be cleared, and your conscious mind where everything sticks around. It’s only the dreams that have a real impact that you spend a lot of your conscious mind thinking about that tend to stick with you for the long haul…writing them down accomplishes that data transfer.

I could be wrong….

Great ideas @dalepetrie and all. I’m in a group now that works with our dreams. It’s been fascinating and useful, so I don’t really buy the theory that dreams are meaningless processing.

Our working theory in the group is that dreams are in the realm of the unconscious, and the unconscious has messages for us about how we are living our everyday life. With the group’s help in decoding and interpreting my dreams, it’s been helpful for adjusting how I live my life.

I heard that if you re-visit your dream as soon as you wake up it improves your memory…not sure how true that is but I heard that somewhere.

I find that if I tell someone about my dream right after I wake up, I tend to remember myself orating, and so I recall the dream that way.

I always remember my dreams (I have never wrote what I dream, and I rarly tell anyone) some are really f’d up, and others are less f’d up

I once dreamt that I was being chased by the hamburglar

It’s soo wierd,whenever I wake up, I forget my dream but whenever I go back to sleep my drea comes back! It’s kinda wierd :P

You should look at Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter 7, Part A: “The Forgetting of Dreams.” In short, Freud thinks that we forget out dreams because dreams are repressed wishes, and our unconscious mind wants them to remain repressed. He calls this “dream-censorship.” He sees great significance in this censorship: “There is…no possible doubt that a dream is progressively forgotten on waking. One often forgets it in spite of a painful effort to recover it. I believe, however, that just as one generally overestimates the extent of this forgetting, so also one overestimates the lacunae in our knowledge of the dream due to the gaps occurring in it. All the dream-content that has been lost by forgetting can often be recovered by analysis; in a number of cases, at all events, it is possible to discover from a single remaining fragment, not the dream, of course- which, after all, is of no importance- but the whole of the dream-thoughts. It requires a greater expenditure of attention and self-suppression in the analysis; that is all; but it shows that the forgetting of the dream is not innocent of hostile intention.”—S.F.

@wildpotato freud was wrong about a lot of other stuff too…

Maybe it sounds better in German. I love ”..the forgetting of the dream is not innocent of hostile intention.”

Der Vergessen vom Traum ist nicht unschuldig von feindlicher Absicht?

my german is insanely rusty :-/

@ABoyNamedBoobs03: It sounds just as awkward and pretensious in German. I have always found the double negative annoying, not to mention the passive voice.

@ABoyNamedBoobs03 ::sigh:: Yes, he was. That is what people always say when I bring up any part of Freud’s thought. People use his crazy theory of penis envy as an excuse not to take him seriously even when they ought to.

No person has done more to change the ways we think about ourselves and our minds than Freud did. In academia, we refer to his work as “the second Copernican turn.” He was the first person to take dream-theory out of the hands of astrologists and think about it scientifically. He was not just full of it, and you really ought to read what he wrote before knocking him. FYI, he would probably agree wholeheartedly with the way that Trustinglife is investigating dream-interpretation.

Oh I have. I’m not saying he wasn’t right or at least scratching the surface on certain things, and I do give him credit to be one of the first to look at it from a scientific standpoint, but his thoughts on dream repression most likely aren’t accurate.

@ABoyNamedBoobs03 Have you read any Freud? What makes you think that his theories on dream repression aren’t accurate?

Freud is/was a freak. He’s a cocaine snorting idiot who had a few seemingly good ideas. His cigar fixation = penis envy is also well documented. In short, freud is/was a joke. Anything he had to say should be taken with a grain of salt.

Read up on Carl Jung and Calvin Hall. Describing their theories on the matter of Dream analysis are much more logical. Explaining it all in adequate detail would a take a bit longer than I’m willing to invest.

@Zendo I want my 3 seconds back.

@ABoyNamedBoobs03 I have read a little Jung, and I tend to agree with my psych buddy when he says that Jung did pretty much everything Freud did, but better. However, that hardly dives anyone cause to dismiss Dr. F and his revolutionary work.

Why on earth would your only response be “freud was wrong about a lot of other stuff too…” if you are a reader of psychoanalytic texts? None of my classmates would dare to leave it at that. Gimmie something to work with here!

I ask again, have you read any Freud? And even if you don’t have time to defend your opinions, could you please cite your references to Jung and Hall, so I can see what you’re talking about for myself?

I have read Freud. All I did was leave a simple answer, I meant that you have to take freud with a grain of salt, I don’t see how that was so traumatic for you.
your Reference

@wildpotato…3…2…1….There you go dear.

@ABoyNamedBoobs03 time to be unfriendly, eh? Too bad, I thought we were going to have a good debate.

Much of the basis for our dream group is Jung’s work on the unconscious. I read a little bit of Freud a long time ago, so I’m not going to add anything to that discussion. I wonder if Jung had anything to say about the remembering and forgetting of dreams.

Mine don’t fade! Sometimes I think about mine all day, and sometimes the memory of them comes back to me at odd, seemingly random moments throughout the day.

Sometimes I am struck with the sudden memory (or feeling) of a dream I had years ago.

That said, I’m pretty big into dreams. I read a lot about dreaming, especially lucid dreaming, and I have long, vivid dreams every night. So that might be part of it.

@Trustinglife enjoy

@juniper – but you probably brood over your dreams and think about them as soon as you wake up, which moves them from your unconscious to your conscious mind.

I heard on a TV program about “savants” that your brain throws away stuff that it doesn’t think is necessary. Savants remember everything – can quote a book verbatum, remember every date of every battle in every war, etc., but can’t button their own shirt. The disorder is that their brain doesn’t have the capability to store useful information and discard useless information. I think that is what your brain is doing when it so quickly discards your dreams.

@Skaggfacemutt you touched on the surface of savantism, but there are varying degrees, types of savantism. When you hear of someone who can ‘taste’ colour, they’re usually a savant. most savants do not however, have a photographic memory, very few do. A well known example of a Savant is “The Rain Man” which was based off of a real person living in New england I think, I’m not sure though.

That is the person that the TV program was about. His name is Kim Peek, and lives right here in Salt Lake City. I know I oversimplified the explanation of savantism, but I think the theory is correct as far as why we don’t remember our dreams. It’s a purging system that our brains have.

I don’t think it has anything to do with purging though, to be honest.

Well, it’s just my theory.

My dreams very rarely fade and I often wish they would. I have a ot of nightmares and disturbing dreams that often make me scared to go to sleep in the first place :(

I think it’s because when you’re dreaming you’re not using your “waking memory”. When we are awake our short-term memory is turned on but when we are asleep we don’t need it. It’s like a regression to a state mammals have when they sleep.

I usually remember all my dreams though. I wrote them down in a diary for almost a year and since then I haven’t had problems recalling them. If you google the term “lucid dreaming” you should come across many references to remember your dreams.