0 WHY DO WE FORGET OUR DREAMS?

Maybe we're suppose to....

Did you know we have dreams every night, whether we remember them or not come morning?  We have five dreams per night on average, according to Scientific American, which translates to 1,825 dreams per year.  So, why can't we recall all of them?

It turns out that the part of your brain that stores information in long-term memory shuts off while you’re asleep. So your dreams never make it out of short-term memory. That’s why most people only remember snippets of their latest dream right as they wake up, and quickly forget them.

Recalling a Dream...
Even people who recall dreams usually only recall one or two, which is a tiny fraction of our overall dreaming in a night. Nature did not intend for us to recall our dreams. The function of dreaming is to forget stuff not to recall it, although it can be interesting to recall some of our dreams and read off the meaning in the metaphors. If you wake up naturally, i.e. without an alarm clock, you are more likely to recall a dream. Even if you only recall a fragment, record it and often the rest of the dream will come backing into your memory. The more you get interested in recalling your dreams the more you will start to recall them. Remind your brain just before you fall asleep that you would like to remember a dream.

So we forget our dreams because perhaps nature wanted us to -  that is, to improve the mind's ability to meet our human needs during wakefulness and nature does this by suppressing certain brain chemicals necessary for converting short-term memories into
long-term ones during REM sleep.
Unless a dream is particularly vivid and if one wakes during or immediately after it, the content of the dream will not be remembered.

By keeping a journal of our dreams, in time, we should be able to recall them with greater efficiency.



Source(s): why-we-dream.com, scientificamerica, tesh.com, wikipedia