Many people are familiar with the feeling when a dream seems extremely vivid and emotional, but within a few minutes of waking up, only fragments or nothing at all remain. Scientists explain: this is not a memory impairment, but a natural feature of the brain's work during sleep.
The most intense dreams occur during the rapid eye movement phase, known as REM sleep. During this period, the brain is actively forming images, stories, and emotional experiences. At the same time, the areas responsible for logic, control, and long-term memory, such as the prefrontal cortex, are less active. Because of this, dreams are almost never recorded as stable memories.
Brain chemistry also plays an important role. During REM sleep, levels of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that is essential for consolidating events in memory, drop significantly. When it is deficient, the brain does not perceive sleep as information that needs to be stored.
Another factor is the moment of awakening. When a person opens their eyes, the brain instantly switches to processing signals from the real world—light, sound, movement. These new stimuli quickly crowd out the fragile traces of the dream unless the person consciously tries to recall what they saw immediately after waking up.
Scientists emphasize that forgetting dreams is not a defect, but part of their function. Dreams serve the role of emotional processing of experiences, helping the brain to "reset" the psyche and reduce stress levels. Storing every dream in memory could, on the contrary, overload the consciousness.
Thus, the rapid disappearance of dreams is a normal and even beneficial process. The brain uses dreams not for memorization, but for internal work with emotions and experiences.
