Remembering Dreams: Why Bother?

Trying to remember your dreams can be incredibly frustrating.  It's like trying to capture smoke with a colander.  (Hey -- you gotta have a lot of sleepless nights to come up with similes like that.)  Most of the time you just can't remember your dreams.  This feeling of frustration causes many people to stop even trying.

It's not as if dreams are made to be remembered.  Dreams assist the body in several ways, although just how is they do it not entirely clear.  Some researchers think that dreams help our memories by helping us forget or at least tone down bad memories.

I don't know about you, but forgetting a wonderful dream makes for bad memories.  But how do I know that I had such a great dream to begin with?  Actually, I don't. Although we may experience the certainty that we've forgotten something important such as a great dream, this may be a false feeling.

Now, I've been dreaming about singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel since 1986.  Unsurprisingly, he sings in a lot of the dreams.  Many times he sings songs already recorded but there are those times when he sings a brand new song I've never heard before.  When I wake up from these dreams, it's incredibly frustrating not to remember them.  Certainly these songs in my dreams would constitute great works of art or at least make good Peter Gabriel songs?

Not really.  In my college years (1987 - 1991) I managed to keep a more or less steady dream journal (sadly now lost.)  I would sleep with a open notebook and a pen next to my bed or even on my bed with me.  When I woke from a dream, I'd scribble a line or two in the dark while the dream was still fresh.  Eventually, I managed to catch one of these new songs by Dream Peter.

A chorus went something like this (brace yourself):

Know that you are Queen for a Day
No matter what else they might say
Go in close or far away
Know that you are Queen for a Day.

Fortunately, I didn't remember any more lyrics.  I learned that my subconscious is just not that good of a songwriter.  (Peter Gabriel fans will be unsurprised to learn that I had this dream soon after the release of the single Shaking the Tree, a song Gabriel describes as "for the women of the world.")

Your dreams may at times seem to hold the elusive answers to all of your questions, but really they don't.  Your dreams do not know any more than you have seen, heard, learnt or guessed.  Sometimes this can be enough.

So, what then is the point of remembering your dreams?  There is no definitive answer to that, but I have my own theories that I've dreamed up.  Bother to remember your dreams because:

• dream recall may help your memory overall
• dream recall can help you look at problems in a different way
• dream recall can help stimulate creativity
• dreams are incredibly entertaining

 Sweet dreams.

Image of bee smoker by fir0002 for Wikimedia Commons.