SelfhelpMagazine

by Richard Wilkerson, Dream Educator

It is often frustrating to lose a skill we enjoyed in our youth, but not necessarily a problem. In general, dream recall and dreamwork is seen as life enhancing, but unlike sleep, dreams are not essential to our well being.

It seems that dreams are doing what they need to be doing without our helping them along in any way. Dream science says we all have dreams about every 90 minutes during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, so that's about six per night - whether we recall them or not. So in direct response to your question, no, it is not a problem that you no longer recall your dreams.

Furthermore, it's very natural as we age to find it more difficult to recall dreams. Scientists have found that we often have less REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep as we age, and that seems to be one of the primary brain states for remembering dreams. If dreams don't interest you and you are not recalling them, forget about it.

If you feel a loss at not recalling dreams and want to remember more of them, there are many books available on the subject, as well as an article in this SelfhelpMagazine, on learning how to recall dreams.

About the Author:

Richard Wilkerson is general editor for The Internet Dream E-zine, Electric Dreams, and director of DreamGate, the Internet Communications and Dream Education Center. He writes the Cyberphile column for the Association for the Study of Dreams Newsletter.