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Author Topic: don't dream or remember dreams  (Read 4960 times)

diana965

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don't dream or remember dreams
« on: May 19, 2011, 04:37:50 AM »
i was wondering does a person dream every night? and if so, is it bad when i don't remember any of them for the past 5 years. i was wondering if there is something wrong with me? what can i do?

Tony Crisp

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Re: don't dream or remember dreams
« Reply #1 on: May 24, 2011, 02:10:45 PM »
Diana – There is nothing wrong with you. Some ‘normal’ people have never ever remembered a dream. Of course they dream the same as everyone else, shown by rapid eye movements as they sleep and dream.

As you get older one often dreams less, or at least remembers them less frequently, but you can help memory of dreams. Here is a quote from my book Dreams and Dreaming:

There is no such thing as the ‘night of dreamless sleep’ you read about in fiction. The sleep laboratories revealed that our dreaming periods are not haphazard. They arise almost with the regularity of a clock. So after about ninety minutes of sleeping you dream for a period of about five minutes. Then you sleep without REM dreaming for about another sixty minutes before you dream again for approximately 19 minutes. From there on there are lengthening periods of dreaming, ending in a long period of dreams just before you wake from a night’s sleep. Therefore the most radical method of remembering a dream is to set a gentle alarm to wake yourself about an hour before your normal time.

If you are going to use this method it is helpful of course to want to remember a dream and not to resent the waking. Hopefully you can drop off to sleep again once you have recorded your dream. One of the easiest ways of making a record of your dream is to have a small tape-recorder under your pillow or near at hand, and speak your dream into it. Otherwise you will need to rouse yourself enough to write the dream down. Do not wake and think you can remember your dream without recording it in some way. Dreams are often like snowflakes. You may have them in your hand but they melt and disappear as you watch them. Once gone they are very difficult to recall again.

An advantage of the tape recorder over the written record is that a written account is often very brief, and details may be forgotten. With a tape recorder you can remain half asleep and speak the whole dream. It doesn’t matter if you remember ‘only a fragment’. Do not discount what you remember because it is small. Fragments lead us, like a holograph, into the whole.

Tony