Most of the ones we can remember occur during the REM phase, which occupies 20% of the night.
Sometimes we dream very strange things. On other occasions, things that partly do have something to do with our day-to-day lives. Also, through sleep we come to remember things that we have lived or longed for. And many of these times we do not remember what we have dreamed, only in part, or we do not even realize that we have dreamed, although we usually always do.
Why does this happen to us? What are dreams and what are they for? The truth is that the role of dreams in human beings has yet to be clarified. Of course, what does seem to be clear is that by dreaming a thing it will not have a certain meaning. We have all searched the Internet at some point for what a dream we have had means but, according to experts, it does not make any sense or logic.
In order to understand it better, Carles Gaig, coordinator of the Wake and Sleep Disorders study group of the Spanish Society of Neurology, explains that dreams are a cognitive activity generated by the brain while sleeping. “Basically, most of the ones we can remember occur during the REM phase, which occupies 20% of the night. Throughout the 7 or 8 hours that we sleep, we enter this phase about 5 times, and generally cyclically,” he adds.
As he points out, in this phase dreams are quite elaborate and vivid but we are often not able to remember them and, if we do, it is because we have woken up in the middle of that phase and in the middle of that dream. However, he indicates that the other phase of sleep is the ‘non-REM’, which occupies 75-80% of the night. “It is not so clear in it, but it is also likely that there is sleep or cognitive activity. It is more difficult to remember them, they are more elementary and more basic and not very elaborate dreams,” he adds.
Thus, although there are different points of view among experts, it seems that one of the reasons why we forget dreams on most occasions is due to their low emotional charge and intensity. Another factor seems to be related to memory, so that dreams would help us forget unwanted details of our lives.
On the other hand, some very intense dreams decrease our levels of serotonin and noradrenaline, a circumstance that can also affect our ability to remember them.
The fundamental reason for not remembering dreams, however, is related to the fact that when we are awake, most of our memories are related to other times of the day with which they are linked. In this way, if we try to remember what we have eaten at noon, we can link this memory with the people with whom we have had lunch, who has cooked…
On the other hand, in the case of dreams, they tend to be illogical and in most cases we are not able to interrelate it with other dreams that we can try to remember to evoke them.
Source: La Opinión de Málaga
