Remembering All of Your Dreams
Who has never woken up thinking: I had a dream and it was wonderful (or awful, it depends), I will have to tell my friends about it… And not even two hours later, you simply find yourself incapable of remembering what your dream was about! What even happened in this dream? What did it mean? It is said that we’ve already forgotten half of the dream only five minutes after the end of it. It just faded from your memory. But it doesn’t mean there was nothing worth remembering.
A dream is “a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep” (English Oxford Living Dictionaries). Sleep is essential for our overall health and wellness, but do we need dreams to do so? Indeed, we spend about one third of our lives sleeping, which naturally got people interested in the science of dreams. Wouldn’t it be so much better to remember all the dreams we have?
We’ve all woken up during a dream we liked, or even intrigued us. Because after all, it’s this aspect of the unknown, magical side, that fascinates us. Who has never tried to go back to sleep to try to resume the dream?
Indeed, we, as human beings, all dream; but we don’t all necessarily remember them when we wake up: everyone knows someone dreaming every single night, and someone claiming they just “do not dream”. Truth is, some people recall their dreams every time, while some simply don’t. Why? Sleep revolves around sleep cycles, each lasting around an hour and a half. Which means we don’t only dream once, but several times during the night. Crazy, right? So if you remember a dream, it’s the one you had during the last cycle before you woke up. Even if you remember one dream, it still means you don’t remember the previous ones. Here are some explanations about remembering dreams:
- If you’re really tired, and so heavy-sleeping with no interruptions, you’ll hardly remember anything, whereas lighter sleepers, as they’re more likely to wake up more often during the night (and so during one of the cycles), their dreams are still fresh in their minds. These kind of sleepers basically wake up “mid-dream”.
- The way you eat could influence the fact that your remember your dreams or not: if you ate too much for instance before bedtime. You are what you eat after all, right?
- Some dreams are simply not memorable: going to work, walking your dog, taking a shower… So you just don’t remember. Yet, it doesn’t mean they are not worth remembering.
- Some dreams are so stressful that you just don’t want to remember them at all.
- If you don’t take time to wake up and think about your dream because you’re maybe be in a rush to go to work whatsoever, your brain just passes on the dreams and focuses on the immediate tasks.
- If you really want to remember every single dream by waking up at the end of every cycle (hope you can fall back to sleep easily!), then set an alarm every hour and a half.
- As you’re falling asleep in a peaceful, quite environment, let the wish of remembering your dreams be your last thought.
- Writing down or telling your dreams out loud right after waking up is a good technique to remember. Even if it seems like small details, if might actually help you remembering more of that dream. There are no small details.
The science of dreams is one of the most tricky and foggiest that exist, of all sciences.
Usually, what you tend to remember is the weirdest part of the dream: the unusual, bizarre and unexpected events; especially if you’re able to “lucid dream”: when you’re aware and consciously choose what your dream will be about, and control it.. But as a matter of fact, remembering the dreams you had could be indicators of your overall health, and sleeping pattern. If you’re not able to remember your dreams, it might indicate and lead to health risks of an other level: depression, irritability, hallucinations, immune system breakdowns… The list is quite long.
Even if the science of dreams was once quite limited, researchers have, these past years, made quite the discovery. Indeed, Japanese scientists developed a “dream-reading machine”, a new advanced technology enabling them to record people’s dreams, and play them back to them, like a TV program; isn’t it incredible? Indeed, this device uses MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and is capable to take illustrations and thoughts directly from the human brain, while sleeping. It’s transmitted on a computer, your brain activity ready to be measured and interpreted. This data is then related to an algorithm which reconstructs your dream, to play it back to you when you wake up.
The process was: the participants helping this study, fell asleep inside an MRI machine, hooked up to electroencephalography machines. Scientists then studied the neurological patterns occurring in their brain, to spot when they were entering the dreaming sleeping phase, starting just a few minutes after falling asleep. When they did find it, they woke up the participants, and asked them if they remembered what they were dreaming about. This process has been repeated about two hundred times for each person. It was then up to the algorithm: it rigorously took pics and videos from the internet, and basically created a movie of each dream, ready to be played back to the participants.
However this breakthrough is far from being perfect and on point, as scientists only got 60% of accuracy for each subjects, recording and interpreting the dreams. It needs time to work better, the algorithm continuing to improve and refine itself. It is, nevertheless, still a discovery of great importance in the world of technology and science: a machine that can read our mind? Who would have even considered this possible at all? And yet, it becomes reality. Falling in the right hands, it could revolutionise the way we understand everything revolving around dreams. It could eventually become a way to improve our waking lives…
…But it also means that even your dreams, which are very personal belongings, will not be private anymore. It would allow us inside our own heads, which could be pretty scary in a way. Dreams wouldn’t even be dreams anymore… Should dreams therefore be turned into memories?
Would you do it?
