It may seem hard to believe for those who rarely remember their dreams, but psychologists have found strong evidence that sleep and dreaming are closely intertwined with the dynamics of memory. Whether or not the dreams are consciously recalled in waking, the dreaming process seems to play a valuable role in the underlying system by which our memories are created, stored, and retrieved.
Researchers have discovered, for instance, that different stages of sleep support different aspects of memory consolidation, and that sleep deprivation can severely disrupt learning, memory, and other cognitive functions. According to the “ontogenetic hypothesis” of Howard Roffwarg and colleagues, the high proportion of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in infancy and early childhood contributes to healthy brain development, which includes processing new experiences and building a foundation of primal memories. And new research by Deniz Kumral and colleagues has provided neuroscientific evidence to support the direct involvement of dreaming in the learning and memory formation process.
Dreaming of the Past
Even a brief look at the content of dreams confirms this close connection with memory. Dreams are often filled with vivid and realistically detailed images of past experiences with people, places, and activities, sometimes years or even decades later. Some past experiences, especially from childhood and adolescence, can recur in dreams throughout one’s life. These early memories become a kind of template for future dreaming, a filter through which dreams evaluate new experiences and weave them into our ongoing sense of self. Sigmund Freud made it a cardinal principle of psychoanalytic interpretation to look for a dream’s roots in the dreamer’s memories of early childhood experiences and fantasies.
In addition to personal memories, dreams sometimes include references to family and cultural memories. Particularly in cases with traumatizing events in the communal past, the memories evoked in such dreams can be painful. However, these dreams may also provide an opportunity for generational witnessing, for keeping these sad historical truths alive in present-day awareness and documenting them for the benefit and understanding of those in the future.
Dream Journaling as a Practice of Memory
Keeping a dream journal makes it easier to remember previous dreams and track their patterns over time. Many people find it enjoyable, and even healing in a way, to review a long series of their dreams from the past and reflect on what has changed or evolved in their lives and what has remained stable and consistent. Especially in our later years, a dream journal becomes a kind of time machine that enables people to revisit the most meaningful moments and relationships from their distant past. It becomes possible in this process to discern the great arc of one’s life journey along what Carl Jung called the path of individuation, at the end of which we hopefully find a sense of wholeness and final actualization.
This is true even for those people who rarely remember their dreams. Dream recall tends to increase simply by means of an increased interest in and awareness of dreaming. In other words, the more dreams you want to remember, the more you probably will remember.
Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, August 11, 2025.
