You spend a third of your life asleep, a good chunk of which involves dreaming. But most often, you don't remember any of your dreams. And even on those lucky days when you wake up with a memory of the dream still floating in your mind, there's a good chance that in just a minute the memory will vanish into thin air and back to dreamland.
In waking life, such a case of quickly forgetting recent experiences would surely land you in a doctor's office. With dreams, however, forgetting is normal. Why?
"We have a tendency to immediately forget dreams, and it's likely that people who rarely report dreams are just forgetting them more easily," said Thomas Andrillon, a neuroscientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. It might be hard to believe that you had a dream if you don't remember anything, but studies consistently show that even people who haven't recalled a single dream in decades or even their entire lifetime, do, in fact, recall them if they are awakened at the right moment, Andrillon said. [Can I Control My Dreams?]
You've got about 30 seconds after you awaken to accurately record it. Easier said than done. To read more, click here.