Is it Possible to Remember Dreams Clearly?

The poet Emerson (1884) expressed the difficulty of remembering dreams most eloquently:

Dreams are jealous of being remembered; they dissipate instantly and angrily if you try to hold them. When newly awakened from lively dreams, we are so near them, still agitated by them, still in their sphere - give us one syllable, one feature, one hint, and we should repossess the whole; hours of this strange entertainment would come trooping back to us; but we cannot get our hand on the first link or fiber, and the whole is lost. There is a strange wistfulness in the speed with which it disperses and baffles our grasp.

The experiments make it clear that most of the dreams that can be recalled if people are woken up during the night are not normally remembered in the morning. Even people who claim to remember dreams every morning only recall their most recent dream, and any dreams they may have had during the two or three REM periods earlier in the night, or even during non-REM sleep, are completely lost.

While we are all familiar with (and resigned to) a certain amount of forgetfulness during the day, being unable to remember breakfast or lunch by three o'clock in the afternoon would definitely put one in the category of suffering from a severe case of amnesic syndrome. The evidence, however, clearly shows that this sort of wholesale forgetting is normal while we are asleep.

Something about the experience of dreaming makes dreams peculiarly difficult to remember, even in ideal circumstances. A common method of collecting dream reports is to ask people to keep dream diaries - to write down, as soon as they wake up in the morning, any dreams they can remember. Cohen and Wolfe (1973) asked their subjects to telephone the local weather information service upon awakening, and to record a few details of the weather forecast at the top of their diary sheet before writing down their accounts of their dreams. A control group was instructed to lie quietly in bed for a few moments before writing down what they could recall of their dreams. The experimental subjects, distracted for a moment by having to make a telephone call and record the predicted temperature for the day, recalled very few dreams indeed, compared with the control group. Again, while distraction can cause forgetting during the day, this is normally confined to very recent memories that have no obvious meaning (such as unfamiliar telephone numbers that have just been looked up). If briefly distracted from watching a film or television program, we would be very surprised not to be able to remember anything about it afterwards.