How many dreams do we have a night?

Question

how don't we remember them all?

Answer 1

Great question ... be prepared for a variety of answers where all of them may be entirely different.

As you know -or can imagine- sleeping in general and dreams specifically are one of the most perplexing subjects within all of human behavior.  Although there is medical consensus that people need to sleep in order to continue living (yes, sleeping is as vital to our health as drinking water and eating food), there is little consensus on why we actually sleep.

ant that, in itself, is astonishing when considered against the fact that most people spend about one-third of their lives sleeping.  As such, considering a life expectancy of let's say, 78 years then, on average, a person sleeps for a combined total of 26 years!!!

Most of the material (typically academic) that I read on dreaming indicates there are five stages to our sleep cycle with an average complete cycle taking about 90-120 minutes, and these stages are related to our dream cycles (see the web links provided below for more in-depth information).

"The sleep cycle begins with four stages of SWS (Slow-Wave Sleep), also called NREM (Non-REM). Note that after the completion of the 4th stage, the 5th stage does not immediately begin; instead, the first 4 stages quickly reverse and are then immediately followed by a REM period. The first REM period will occur roughly 90 minutes after falling asleep; thus the first REM period will last only about 10 minutes, given the length of each sleep cycle being roughly 100 minutes. The length of the stages is not static, however: as the night proceeds, the length of stages 3 and 4 (also called delta or deep sleep) begins to wane, and the length of REM sleep increases, up to about one hour in length after a number of cycles. Therefore, as the night goes on, you dream for longer periods of time"

Generally, any given person may complete five distinct sleep cycles in a night's sleep.

"The period of non-REM sleep (NREM)is comprised of Stages 1-4 and lasts from 90 to 120 minutes, each stage lasting anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. Surprisingly, however, Stages 2 and 3 repeat backwards before REM sleep is attained. So, a normal sleep cycle has this pattern: waking, stage 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, REM. Usually, REM sleep occurs 90 minutes after sleep onset. "

As such, depending on how you would define "a dream" it's possible that, on average there's a dream within every sleep cycle -or even dozens of dreams within a cycle.

Regarding why it is difficult to remember our dreams, the research literature generally points to dream amnesia.  "This is not due to anything paranormal or supernatural, but to weak encoding. Memory depends upon encoding the data of experience. Encoding depends upon connections in parts of the brain, which in turn depend upon connections in experience. An event with a strong emotional component is more likely to be remembered than one with no emotional component because emotional memories are recorded in one part of the brain while visual components are recorded in another. Neural connections link them.

We are likely to remember dreams if we wake shortly after they occur. Even so, if we do not encode the dream by making some effort to remember it, we are likely to forget it. Some people assist memory by getting up and writing down the dream. Others find that an easier method is to stay in bed and create some associations. The easiest association is made by giving the dream a title and a purposive description. For example, a dream of being chased by a polar bear across the snow into a library might be labeled "Research the Polar Bear." Go back to sleep and you are likely to remember the dream by recalling the title.

I hope this is helpful.

Answer 2

i have several dreams a night

sometimes i have nightmares then dreams then nightmares again

i only remember the EXTREMELY good or bad ones

Help me with my question please:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Answer 3

We have 2 dreasm a night, 1. what we think about when we are getting to sleep. We then dream about this for the first part of the night then drift off and this is when we forget our dreams.

2. this is what we a dreaming about just before we wake up and this is what we then remember...  

Answer 4

supposedly we have a lot, like thousands

its our subconcious mind,so like, a lot of it just gets forgotten.