this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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It wasn't dreamless, you just weren't remembering your dreams. If your sleep was truly dreamless for a lengthy period of time you'd be dead.
Often simply changing your sleeping habits in any significant way is enough to get you to start remembering dreams. That's because you need to wake up "unexpectedly" in the middle of a REM sleep phase to have a chance to form memories of them. Normally your brain has its memory-forming mechanism disengaged during REM sleep because there's no good reason to remember that stuff - it's just a side effect of a mental housekeeping routine.
You can also "train" yourself to remember dreams more often, to some degree, by trying to record a dream journal or otherwise forcing your brain to lay down some memories of those dreams the moment you wake up and they're still present in your short-term memory.
Well usually you wake up after each dream circle. You just don't remember it because you fall asleep almost instantly. That really was a problem when my father would wake me up in the morning and I couldn't remember him waking me up and slept for another half an hour)
Then I started with a dream journal. I don't do it anymore because I'm lazy, but I still remember waking up multiple times a night and remembering exactly what I just dreamed and notice the memory fading away.
When I journaled my dreams were extremely vivid. It isn't like this anymore but I still sometimes have lucid dreams even though I can't really stabilize and control them.
You're not supposed to remember your dreams. When you remember your dreams it's when you were woken unexpectedly, or when you consciously or unconsciously fled the dream before returning it to the Dreammaster.
We only borrow our dreams from him every night, but when we leave a dream prematurely we are stealing that dream - bringing it into our reality and hiding it away in our memories.
However precious or horrid your stolen dreams may be, remember that the Dreammaster will claim them back from you. He always does, in the end.
Thank you. The only scientific answer in this thread.
I for one welcome my sleep overlord.