You wake up in the middle of the night with your last super fresh dream, you delight for a moment in how funny and crazy it was and decide to tell your partner or your friends about it when you wake up. But when you do, you barely remember that there was something funny you wanted to tell them. Many of us have had this feeling at some point, but not all of us with the same frequency. And there is people who remember dreams very easily, while others rarely manage to do so. They even think that perhaps they don’t dream at all, because they don’t usually remember any dreams, not even when they just woke up.
The latter happens to 1 in every 250 people, according to a study published in 2015. But the reality is that most people do dream every day. The difficulty is not in dreaming, but in remember it. Until recently, scientists were not clear why some people remember dreams and others who do not. There were certain hypotheses, some of which even pointed to the personality of each individual. But it was not known for sure.
Nowadays, thanks to several studies published in the last decade, there are much more information about it. We know that people who remember dreams do so because their brain is more attentive to external stimuli while they sleep. Said very roughly, does not rest in such depth. But let’s see what this means exactly.
The keys to people who remember dreams
Most studies agree that the key to some people remembering dreams is their ability to stay alert while they sleep. For example, in 2014 a team of scientists from Lyon Neuroscience Research Center carried out a study in which this was seen very clearly. 41 volunteers participated in it, of which 21 declared themselves as people who remember dreams, with an average of 5.2 dreams remembered per week. On the other hand, for the remaining 20, the average was much lower, about 2 dreams a month.
They all underwent a positron emission tomography (PET). This is an imaging technique that allows us to see which brain regions are active at each moment, which is why it was performed while they were sleeping. Thus, it was seen that those who tend to remember dreams have greater activity in a brain region known as temporo-parietal junction. This is responsible, among other functions, for providing orientation and attention towards external stimuli. Therefore, people who are more active tend to have lighter sleep. This is something that was confirmed in a 2017 study in which It was observed that people who describe less deep sleep They also tend to remember what they dream more
On the other hand, other scientists have verified that people who remember what they dream also have more activity on the network by default. This is a brain area that is activated when the brain is at rest, but awake. That is, we have not fully woken up yet, but we are already analyzing stimuli.
All this makes sense, since, when we wake up, the long-term memory encoding It is very vulnerable. Any distraction will prevent us from saving recent memories, so if we fall asleep quickly or simply remain sleepy, we will most likely not be able to remember what we have dreamed. On the other hand, if we tend to be more attentive to what surrounds us and wake up more easily, it will be easier to remember.
What if they dream more?
There are researchers who think that people who remember dreams actually do so because they dream more. So, by probability, it will be easier to remember some. This has not been demonstrated with sufficient solidity, although it is true that there are some interesting indications. For example, it has been seen that these people tend to have a greater concentration of white matter in the medial prefrontal cortexinvolved in processing information about oneself.
Gray matter is what is mainly composed of the somata of neurons. That is, that most voluminous part, which resembles a head. Instead, white matter is made up primarily of the connections between these neurons, known as axons. Each one has its own functions. Furthermore, they are concentrated differently in different regions. And this, with regard to dreams, is striking, because it has been proven that people with lesions that affect the white matter, especially in the aforementioned area, They lose the ability to dream.
Therefore, it is possible that those who remember more dreams do so simply because they dream more. But it may also be because, even awake, they are not able to disconnect from what they dreamed about. Whether it was good, or whether it was the worst of nightmares.