Why do we remember dreams?

When you wake up from a dream, is your brain full of vivid details that you recount to your friends and family? Or does the memory slip away by breakfast time?

Our ability to remember dreams upon waking is called dream recall. But the factors that influence this ability are little understood. Now, new research led by the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy, reveals that both individual characteristics and external factors are important.

“Our findings suggest that dream recall is not just a matter of chance but a reflection of how personal attitudes, cognitive traits, and sleep dynamics interact,” explains lead author Giulio Bernardi from the IMT School.

“These insights not only deepen our understanding of the mechanisms behind dreaming but also have implications for exploring dreams’ role in mental health and in the study of human consciousness.” 

Tell ’em you’re dreaming

Humans sleep for approximately 230,000 hours over the course of their lives – that’s 26 years spent asleep.

We primarily dream during the rapid eye movement (REM) part of our sleep cycle, which occurs about every 90 minutes. It gets longer as the night goes on, from just a few minutes   at the beginning of sleep to more than 20 minutes by the time a person has slept for 8 hours.

The final hours of sleep generally contain the most dreaming. If we remember our dreams, it’s often the last dream of the night before waking up.

But while some people can recall their dreams every day, others only remember a dream every now and then. And some people never remember them at all – a 2015 study found that one in 250 people have never remembered a dream in their life.

Why is this so?

Researchers are beginning to dive into the science of dream recall, looking at a variety of factors that may influence it, including gender, age, personality, cognitive functions, creativity and mental state.

For example, a 2008 analysis of 175 studies found that women remember more dreams than men, and younger people have higher dream recall than older people. Generally, children’s dream recall tends to increase at the age where they can communicate the dream, plateau in their teens and 20s, and then gradually decline into adulthood.

Another 2017 study suggested that dream recall may be tied to personality, such as the trait of being open to try new things.

But the research is not conclusive, and there is much left to be done – especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many studies reported a change in people’s dreaming and dream recall.

Bigger dreams

This new study from the IMT School set out to narrow down the factors that influence dream recall.

From 2020 to 2024, the team engaged more than 200 participants across a wide age range (18 to 70). Each participant was given a voice recorder and instructed to verbally record their dreams immediately upon waking. They did this every day for 15 days, reporting whether or not they remembered dreaming, if they remembered anything about the experience, and if so, what occurred during the dream.

During those days, the participants wore a sleep-monitoring watch called an actigraph, which tracked sleep duration, efficiency, and any disturbances.

They also underwent psychometric tests at the start and end of the 15-day period to measure a variety of factors including memory, anxiety levels, selective attention, tendency to let their mind wander and interest in dreams.

When the researchers analysed all the data, they found that dream recall varied considerably between each person, and seemed to be as a result of several factors.

For example, participants were more likely to have high dream recall if they displayed a combination of a) a tendency to let their mind wander and b) a positive attitude towards dreams.

Sleep patterns also influenced dream recall. Participants who recorded longer periods of light sleep were more likely to remember their dreams.

Age seemed to play a role too, suggesting that memory processes during sleep may change with age. Younger participants had higher rates of dream recall, while older participants more often woke up with the sensation that they had dreamt, but without memory of the dream itself.

Participants also reported lower dream recall in winter, compared to spring.

This study adds to the growing literature on dream recall, but it’s still early days.

“Data collected within this project will serve as a reference for future comparisons with clinical populations,” says co-author Valentina Elce, also a researcher at the IMT School.

“This will allow us to move forward the research on the pathological alterations of dreaming and their potential prognostic and diagnostic value.”

The study appears in the journal Communications Psychology.

Boosting dreams