Can we do something to remember our dreams more?

We all know that annoying feeling of waking up with the impression that he had dreamed great things, but without being able to remember one of those dream runs that seemed so exciting. We have crossed the barrier, now we are in the solid and prosaic world of Wake, and dreams have remained on the other side and we cannot recover them now. Of course there is another version of this, even more annoying: It is when we wake up with the dream that is still in the head, more or less clear, and we believe that we have already anchored it in the memory, but minutes later we realize that it is distorted, As if our brains had pressed the ‘the papers empty’ button and had finally eliminated the last Souvenirjir.

Possibly remembering all those night experiences would have served us only to give the look to a loved one, because we all know that telling our own dreams is a much more attractive and stimulating activity than listening to the dreams of others. But it is always angry to forget: somehow we feel that we have escaped a part of ourselves that, who knows, maybe contained an important key. For a large part of the story, some dreams were awarded to a dream Free from the reins of our education and our inhibitions. But although we do not create in that, they are still a part of our lives that, puff, is removed.

Why don’t we remember a few dreams and others? It may sound like perogle rulda, but There is an essential condition to remember what we experience while we sleep: wake up. «Not remembering is a biological state. During the REM, where most dreams occur and, moreover, the most intense, the neuronal systems responsible for consolidating the memory of what is being lived at that time are eliminated. Although it seems paradoxical, both the REM and the no-brake are important to integrate what was experienced in the memory during the previous Wake. We remember a dream if it is intense and is followed by a wake. The awakening is a transition process in which the brain maintains the functioning of the previous condition for a while. That is, follow that weakness to consolidate new memories, In this case of the dream minutes earlier, “says Uruguayan professor Pablo Torterolo, of the Dream Neurobiology Laboratory of the University of the Republic.

“The fact that we remember, fundamentally, depends on the moment we wake up,” says Diego Redolar, from Oberta University of Catalonia and cognitive neuro-lab but there is another factor: If the dream has aroused you or if it has had an emotional impact, the opportunities to remember it will take. Our episodic memorial system is limited, throws many things away and only stores the important. But if the dream has struck you, the Amygdala, which deals with emotional processing, interacts with the Hippocampus, whose episodic memory depends, and points to that dream as something that should be saved. It is a phenomenon similar to that of remembering what we did when the attacks on the Twin Towers took place ».

We usually retain between one and three dreams per week, which correspond to the time immediately to wake up when We actually dream on average two hours a night, and that is only the REM period. A large part of the dream research even consists of awakening the participants at the most indicated moments, so that a larger number of stories can be ‘collection’. Scientists came to the conclusion that our dreams are much less fantasy than we believe: they are usually closer to realism than of flooding imagination. Already in the 60s, an American specialist published that, if his dreamy origin was not revealed to us, the vast majority of dream stories “would be regarded as credible descriptions of common experiences.” Another researcher said we often dream of it The four efhes (“fighting, fleeing, feeding, fornication”, that is, fighting, flight, food and fornication), That can be more or less every day in our lives, but only in the case of the ‘a happy’ flight change the usual order of this world.

A notebook on the bed

Can we improve our memories of what we dream of? Some experts claim that If we explicitly remember ourselves before we fall asleep, that can positively influence it. And of course there is the classic system of leaving notebook and bowling on the bedside table: When we wake up, without even moving or opening our eyes, we must mentally reproduce what we dreamed and then written. “Taking a diary of dreams tends, although relatively little, the ability to remember them,” says Torterolo. In any case, we can also deepen a little more: are you already interested in remembering our dreams, above curiosity? Redolar mentions a recent study by the Italian neuroscientific team Giulio Tononi, one of the most prominent in this area: «They have found the first tests of the importance of remembering dreaming of emotional content: When you are in a similar situation in real life, the brain areas that have to respond to it are activated with less intensity and that reduces fear. Remembering these dreams protects us, minimizes the impact of these situations on daily life ».

Our brains devotes the night to repair and organize their files. Throughout history there have been many cases of people who claim to have found the solution to a problem or a challenge that overwhelmed them. Do we miss a treasure of experience and self -knowledge? «If remembering dreams of fundamental importance was surviving for us as a species, we would talk about a huge lack of biological efficiency, because we remember less than 1% – Pablo Torterolo concludes. It can have a creative advantage, always knowing that they are only dreaming, but it is not essential for life. And one more thing: sleep brings solutions, remember the dream or not. Given the enormous plasticity of the brain, that dream leaves its traces, even if we can’t tell it.

Ideas brought from the other side: from ‘yesterday’ to the sewing machine

Paul McCartney has always told that he dreamed the melody of the song, one of the greatest classics of the Beatles. Fortunately he had a piano next to the bed. “I thought what tone I had dreamed of … and touched her.” Of course the texts did not appear in the dream, so for months the verses he used as a source said «scrambled eggs. / Oh, honey, how I like your legs, / but not as much as scrambled eggs ». McCartney also overwhelmed him that what had dreamed was actually a plagiarism of a foreign song that was recorded in the memory.

The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeléyev has obsessed him to find a way to classify the 56 known elements in his time. «In a dream I saw a table in which everyone took their place, as required. When I woke up, I immediately wrote it in a piece of paper, “he collected in his diary.

The inventor Elias Howe was missing some details so that his pioneer sewing machine worked well. One night he dreamed that he had been arrested by a tribe and that the king awarded him twenty -four hours to complete the design. When the Warriors led him to the execution, he realized that the tips of his spears gave him the solution he was looking for. He woke up and although it was four in the morning, he ran to his workshop: he already had his new needles.

It is known that the novel ‘Frankenstein’ originated from a challenge, in which the guests wanted to write a story of horror to the Swiss residence of Lord Byron: from there the first modern history of vampires also appeared. Well, the idea of ​​the scientist and his monster came into a dream, or rather in a nightmare, days after that challenge was brought in. “What is terrified of me will also terrorize others,” the author wrote in the introduction.