Why do we remember some dreams and not others?

Humans sleep for approximately 230,000 hours over the course of their lives – that’s 26 years spent asleep.

We primarily dream during the rapid eye movement (REM) part of our sleep cycle, which occurs about every 90 minutes. It gets longer as the night goes on, from just a few minutes  at the beginning of sleep to more than 20 minutes by the time a person has slept for 8 hours.

The final hours of sleep generally contain the most dreaming. If we remember our dreams, it’s often the last dream of the night before waking up.

But while some people can recall their dreams every day, others only remember a dream every now and then. And some people never remember them at all – a 2015 study found that one in 250 people have never remembered a dream in their life.

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This new study from the IMT School set out to narrow down the factors that influence dream recall.

From 2020 to 2024, the team engaged more than 200 participants across a wide age range (18 to 70). … The study appears in the journal Communications Psychology.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here