Dream Forgetfulness

Abstract: If we wake up during a dream, we remember the contents of our dream, but generally only for the blink of an eye. Our dream is quickly erased from our memory unless the dream was highly interesting or shocking for us or we spend conscious effort to remember it—by jotting it down in a dream diary, for example. An explanation is proposed of why this hasty erasure happens. Despite the apparent initial erasure of dream contents from our memory, we seem to retain at least fragments of some of our dreams for some time, although those fragments are recalled only in certain rare circumstances. This “deep storage” of portions of some of our dreams in our memory, conjoined with certain other facts about dreams, is evidence against the view that dreams are useless side-products of the brain’s operations during sleep