Why some people remember dreams and others don't

In "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat", Joseph recalls his dreams in extraordinary (musical) detail, but many of us wake up each morning to find not a single dream memory will do.

Now, scientists have discovered a string of factors that influence whether we remember our dreams or not – so we can all be more Joseph.

Positive attitude, wandering mind

Interest in dreams, and our memories of them, rose during the Covid pandemic, when, according to a large multinational study, some people, particularly women, said they were able to recall their dreams more frequently. The researchers at the time attributed this to stress, anxiety and 'the emotional intensity of the pandemic'.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But now a new study, conducted between 2020 and 2024, has zeroed in what makes it more likely that you'll recall a dream.

Scientists from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy, gave each of their 204 male and female volunteers a sleep-monitoring wristwatch that detects sleep duration, efficiency, and disturbances. They also issued them each with a voice recorder, and asked them to record, right after waking each morning, everything that was going though their mind and everything they remembered from before waking up.

The results, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that the people most likely to remember their dreams have a positive attitude about dreams and a tendency to let their mind wander during waking hours.

Dream recall also increases in spring and autumn, and after a long night's sleep that includes only a short spell of deep sleep. Younger people tend to remember dreams more, while older people are more likely to experience "white dreams" – where you remember having a dream the night before but can't recall any specific details.

These 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", said psychology professor Giulio Bernardi, one of the study's authors.

Wake slowly

If you want to get better at remembering your dreams, "don't rush to start the day", said BBC Science Focus. Instead, "wake slowly" and, before you do anything else, "think about whether you've been dreaming and what you dreamt about".

Keeping a sleep diary can also help. According to a study in The Journal of Creative Behavior, participants who record dreams in a daily log remember more detail about their dreams than those who don't.