Why is it so hard to remember our dreams last night?

Almost everyone after waking up, do not remember the dream last night. Whether it's a beautiful dream or a nightmare. Although it can be remembered at times, it is only a fragment of the dream or a particular part of it that you may notice in the morning. Why is it so hard to remember our dreams last night? Come on, find out the answer in the following review.

Why do humans dream?

Dreams are stories or images created by the mind while we are asleep. Dreams can be comforting and fun, so they want to be remembered when they wake up. It could also be that your dream is disturbing, strange, and creepy that you want to forget.

Someone can dream because the dream is a form of random signals from the brain and body or as a reaction of the brain when processing the information you get during the day.

Why is it so hard to remember last night's dream?

There are several possible reasons why a person cannot remember dreams. First, it is possible that REM sleep is not occurring as normally as it does. REM sleep is a dream sleep phase that usually occurs 90 minutes after a person begins to fall asleep. In this phase, the brain is more active, your heart rate and breathing become faster. This sleep indicates that you are not sleeping well because your eyes are experiencing rapid movements. This sleep cycle is short-lived and can last up to an hour at most. The transition from REM sleep to another phase of sleep, such as deep sleep, also makes dreams easy to forget.

Reporting from Scientific American, Ernest Hartmann, professor of psychiatry at Tuffs University School of Medicine and founder of the Sleep Disorder Center at Newton Wellesle Hospital explains that almost all people who wake up forget the dreams they experience. It is associated with neurochemistry (chemical processes on nerves) in the brain when REM sleep occurs.

Besides that, the most believed and the simplest explanation for why you have trouble remembering last night's dreams is that your brain sometimes doesn't store things that are not important; especially as dreams that are sometimes unclear, plotless, and overlapping.

Just try to remember, this morning when you showered you were dumbfounded thinking about anything? It's hard to remember, isn't it? Meanwhile, you may still remember what it was like from your graduation years ago. This is proof that the human brain can indeed distinguish which information is important stored in memory, and which is not important and can be discarded.

Even though most of the dreams are gone, you can still feel that you have just dreamed. For example, a memorable or frightening dream.

This dream will attract attention because of the emotional connection and activate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, which are areas of the brain that facilitate memory and areas of the brain associated with emotions. This allows you to remember dreams, but only in certain parts of your interest.

What else makes us not remember last night's dream?

The use of antidepressant drugs has a strong effect on delaying or reducing the amount of REM sleep. Likewise with excessive alcohol consumption. This will suppress the REM sleep phase, although not in its entirety. Using an alarm can also interfere with early morning REM sleep.

Sleep disorders such as sleep apnea can also interfere with your ability to remember dreams. Untreated sleep apnea can affect your REM sleep by causing breathing problems and relaxing the muscles of the respiratory tract.