I understand that most of our dreams are forgotten once we wake up. Earnest Hartman, a psychiatry professor, explains that our forgetfulness is due to chemicals in the brain going on during REM sleep, a phase of sleep involving rapid eye movements and dreaming. He also states that forgetting dreams can be caused by the absence of norepinephrine in the cerebral cortex, a part of the brain that plays a role in memory, thoughts, language, and consciousness. To support this theory he used a 2002 study that was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry that depicts the presence of norepinephrine enhances memories in humans. But a lack of norepinephrine is not what completely explains why we forget our dreams. Hartman also includes that there has been some research that suggests that dreaming lies on a continuous sequence with other forms of mental functioning in the cerebral cortex. One side of this sequence …show more content…
(Myers & Dewall, 2016, p. 100). Some researchers argue the idea of dreaming strengthening memories, noting that REM sleep may support memory for reasons unrelated to dreaming and that memory association may also occur during non-REM sleep (Diekelmann &Born, 2010). This is a true statement: A full night of sleep and dreaming plays an important role in order to help remember. (Myers & Dewall, 2016).
The Function of Dream Sleep
Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison suggest the difference between REM and non-REM sleep depends on the dreams associated with them. A human adult spends a total of one and a half to two hours each night in REM sleep. They have found evidence suggesting that most of the dreams during these REM sleep do not reach normal consciousness, or dreams being remembered only if the sleeper awakes while dreaming. Even though the memory of a dream is usually brief, if there is no effort to remember it by rehearsing its content, the dream is forgotten (Crick & Mitchison, 1983).