There is a scientific reason for this. Prepare for minor text wall.
When you fall asleep, your brain erases temporary memory and “closes” permanent memory so that nothing can be stored to it during sleep. This is also the reason you can’t remember what you did a few minutes before falling asleep. Therefore, your dreams are stored in temp memory and you can only remember them for a little bit after waking.
Don’t quote me on this, I found it somewhere, and my somewheres tend to be pretty reliable, but I’m too lazy to fact-check. Feel free to downvote if wrong.
Fun fact! You can train your brain to remember dreams by keeping a dream journal. When you brain dump your short term memory upon waking up your brain starts thinking dreams are important and you can have more vivid and lucid dreams.
Can confirm. I kept one for a year and the memories gradually got stronger. I was surprised to realize that I was usually having 2 to 5 different dreams each night.
I hate it when the dream is so good and lucid, but you wake up and only remember how nice the dream was rather than what you experienced.
Sometimes all I have is an image to work off of, but it's hidden behind one of those magic eye posters. If I can just focus my memory in exactly the right way then the image becomes clear and everything starts to flow after that. That's the best analogy I can come up with right now
I hate that this basically is the first step of learning to make your dreams lucid. "Write down your dreams to find patterns" - Okay sounds easy enough but every morning I'm like oop I forgor
write down
Me after waking up: What are letters? What are those? I should understand them! What do they mean?? HELP!!
When I wake up and know that the dream was particularly good I'll immediately write it down on my phone while it's still semi fresh in my mind for this reason. Over the years I've got quite a collection. Often I'll read a random one and I'm always impressed and weirded out by what my mind came up with lol
How do you remember to do that? I don't even remember to wake up to alarm. Like today. I woke up around 7:30AM instead of 5AM. "Great, my phone probably crashed, and the alarm didn't ring." I get up to get my phone, but it's not there. I start searching for it, it's in my bed. No missed alarm notifications. I grabbed it, dismissed both alarms, and I don't even remember doing any of that.
It's mostly a personal interest. Sometimes i think i do that because it's a sign from my brain because my life is too boring otherwise lol.
I often treat it as people often people treat their journals: its a bit therapeutic because you lay out your thoughts exactly as you remember feeling in the dream.
But i totally get disoriented mornings too.
Intention and habit. If you strengthen the intention of waking up before going to sleep, you can wake up and get up better. If it's a dreadful morning you'd rather sleep through or nothing you want to get up for it'll be a hindrance.
If you have a habit of dismissing the alarm and sleeping again, I'd definitely put it not right next to me but a bit away, where I would at least have to stretch or move out of bed. Make it harder to immediately fall back to sleep.
If you slept two more hours, maybe you needed the sleep though? :)
