We all have a friend or family member who says they never dream. While science may not be able to tell us why we don’t remember our dreams, you are already experiencing them. In sleep studies, they track a patient’s REM sleep to see if they are dreaming. Even if the individual does not remember their dreams, they can still show signs of REM sleep. This means that they are essentially dreaming, but they may not actually remember their dreams.
In the Austrian Dream Retrieval Study, 1,000 Austrians were surveyed about their sleep and dreaming habits. Almost a third of the participants reported dreaming 10 or more times per month. About 37 percent of the participants said they dream 1 to 9 times a month, and only 32 percent say they dream less than once a month.
This study is interesting, but it doesn’t actually mean that the individuals didn’t dream. In most cases, people dream every night. The only reason people think they don’t have dreams is because they don’t remember them.
Of course, it would be impossible to be 100% sure of this. To make sure that every person on Earth dreams, we would have to follow each person for years and wake them up during REM sleep. This is the stage of sleep in which you dream, and waking the person up in the middle of it is a way to tell if they are dreaming. By doing this, you can theoretically prove or disprove whether everyone dreams at night.
As far as scientists know, every human being shows signs of REM sleep. In some cases, people do not actually have dreams during REM sleep. There is no way to know if this happens all the time or not. It is possible to imagine groups of ancient people and tribes who never focused on remembering dreams. According to the ancient Greek historian and writer, Herodotus, this kind of people lived thousands of years ago on Mount Atlas in North Africa. According to Herodotus, the native tribe called the mountain the Pillar of Heaven and never had any dreams. He also said they never ate anything alive. If he was talking about vegan, this would be possible. If he actually meant no living plants or animals previously, we might have to take his story with a grain of salt. Other than this potentially mythical culture, there don’t seem to be any other cultures that never dream. For the most part, dreaming seems to be universal to all cultures.
How does REM sleep work?
REM stands for rapid eye movement. When sleep researchers see this eye movement, they know you are in the part of the sleep cycle where you are most likely to dream. Interestingly, your non-REM sleep actually acquires some dream-like qualities later in the night’s rest.
One of the interesting things sleep researchers found was in brain connections. The left and right brain hemispheres of epilepsy patients were cut to reduce seizures. Among these patients in split brain studies, dreams were no longer reported. This may be due to the way these two halves of the mind work. While the right hemisphere is silent and unconscious during sleep, dreaming is thought to have occurred in the silent side of the brain. With a split brain, the right brain is unable to connect these dreams with the left, conscious, speaking hemisphere.
This theory is supported by EEG studies. During REM sleep, most of the EEG activity is within the right hemisphere. The right brain is not as linear as the left brain. Your left brain looks at cause and effect and keeps track of the linear motions (step 1, step 2, etc.) that get you to a goal. Your right brain does not have this linear progression. If you end up flying into the ocean in your dreams, the right brain doesn’t care how you got into the ocean. It just tells you that you are there.
Interestingly, this theory may also explain why nightmares occur. Negative emotions tend to be the domain of the right brain. If your right brain is activating your dreams, it stands to reason that some of your dreams may have a darker, negative attitude towards them.
When you wake up, you won’t always remember your dreams or nightmares. While you sleep, your memory circuits are busy sorting and encoding real events from your day. If your memory circuits are constantly devoted to dreams, you may begin to confuse dreams with reality. You may not remember your dreams, but that does not mean that you did not dream during the night.