Big dreamers react more to environmental stimuli and wake up more during their sleep than small dreamers. This is why poor sleepers memorize their dreams better.
Why in life are there those who remember their dreams and those who forget everything? One thing is certain, we are not all equal when it comes to dreams: there is even a great injustice every morning. Some can easily remember their dreams. The others, not at all, which is sometimes very frustrating.
For forty years, the accepted explanation was that the sleeping brain could not “print” information in the long-term memory and that it was necessary, to remember a dream, to wake up, even for a very short period. , to be able to print and remember it in the morning when you wake up…
This hypothesis has become a certainty thanks to new machines for exploring the brain*. Volunteers were offered to come and sleep in a laboratory with electrodes on their heads. This made it possible to verify very simply that the great dreamers have a greater quantity of micro-awakenings.
Micro-alarm clocks
Our sleep is divided into several cycles, more or less long depending on the people, which explains why those who have short cycles need less sleep than the others. Between two cycles, we wake up very briefly but completely. Moreover, it is often the perception of these micro-awakenings that gives the impression of a good or bad night… But, there is a certain justice since they are the biggest dreamers!
We then put the volunteers in machines to determine which region of the brain was affected. 40 guinea pigs in total, an infusion in the arm and in a machine that does not particularly invite you to dream; it took a year and a half to get there. But the verification is striking: big dreamers have more activity in a region of the brain than small dreamers. A region that we know is very sensitive to external stimuli… So everything hangs together! Big dreamers have an ability to be more easily awakened, by noises for example, and therefore to memorize their dreams better.
Paradoxical sleep
Beyond the pleasure of understanding, these results are medically valuable because it is another confirmation of the functioning of the so-called “paradoxical” sleep phase, which is the moment when we dream, but also the key element of our unconscious intellectual life.
REM sleep, because never has sleep been so deep and the brain so awake. The phase that precedes it is said to be restorative – in the sense of repairing our body – but this paradoxical sleep is that of the reorganization of the brain. During this phase, he sorts the information taken during the day to memorize only those which are essential; especially the learning phases. In summary, you can wake up in great shape, perfectly repaired from the abuse of the day, but without having completely improved your memory. It is important ! Finally, when you don’t remember your dreams, that doesn’t mean you’re not dreaming, because paradoxical sleep exists in everyone; it simply means that we didn’t print them… because we slept very well!
As Marcel Proust wrote: “A little insomnia is not useless to appreciate sleep! “.
* According to a study by Perrine Ruby, researcher Insermwithin the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center
