Dream Recall / Human Memory Structure and How it Works

Human Memory Structure and How it Works
Posted on November 15, 2013
Honestly I am not sure why I am writing this, a record for my self or maybe someone might find it interesting.

I am an advanced lucid dreamer and obviously understanding how my memory works is very interesting for me. I read few science articles and explanations and decided to make few experiments of my own. So here I will be sharing all my ideas, thinking and results about our memory structure and how it works.

Brief Intro
There are many theories but lets assume that our memory is mostly stored in a formation of neurons in our brain. This is the most popular and most logical version.

So when we are experiencing an event, formation of neurons is stimulated, forming our memory of that event.
When we are sleeping our brain is working as active as if we are awake, in first sleep cycles our memories are being “cleaned up”, unimportant memories are stimulated with a different cocktail of chemicals(less concentrated) and by that weakens connections between those formations of neurons that form particular memory.
Important memories are strengthened as well, I am not sure at which phase. Formations of neurons of important memories are stimulated with a more concentrated mix of chemicals and they are being strengthen and our important memories become more vivid and stronger.

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The study begins
Knowing those facts about our memory I had some questions to answer.


Most people pick one type of lucid dreaming induction and stick to it. I am more of a natural lucid dreamer, all my dreams are lucid so I often have lucid dreams in all those methods/ways. So lets say we want to have maximum dreams/lucid dreams during one night, how and when can we have them?

Made this model for you to understand it better.
1. Going to sleep, starting with nREM WILD, having nREM lucid dream. Moving to next sleep cycles, reaching delta sleep, experiencing emptiness, no visuals or audio.. simply darkness for some time.
2. Getting to REM sleep cycle, having first DILD lucid dream, then moving through those sleep cycles again, emptiness, moving to 2nd DILD, then process repeats and you might have 3 or more REM lucid dreams, you will pass through all those cycles before every REM.
3. Morning, you wake up and go back to dreaming (DEILD), having DEILD lucid dreams.
4. Finally you wake up, recalling usually only DILD’s and DEILD’s. Sometimes nREM WILD’s too. Sometimes DEILD’s only.

Is it possible to go through all those dreams and recall all of them in the morning? What are the limits?
Yes it is possible.
I had a doubt that our dream memory is limited and we cannot recall so many dreams, or we could but some of our dreams were deleted during those cycles when there is a memory cleanup. So my target was to recall all those dreams, including nREM WILD + all DILD’s and + all DEILD’s.

My first two attempts failed, first night I could recall only DILD and did not have DEILD’s because I had to go to work. Next day I recalled mostly DEILD’s, little fragments from DILD’s. The 3rd night I did recall all of them. Started with nREM WILD lucid dream, followed by 3 DILD dreams, two of them I recalled perfectly and one was kinda blurred, also I recalled all DEILD’s in the morning. Moving to the next question.

Memory Structure, how does it look and work like?
The best way is to compare it to other type of memory that we know very well. I will compare it to computer memory. As an example lets take a flower image, in computer our flower image is stored on a hard drive, If we would have 5 very similar flower images they would still be located in completely different locations and there would be no connection between them whatsoever.
Lets take the same example of a flower image in human memory, all 5 flowers are stored in a block of categories. If you pick 1 flower you will definitely find 4 other flowers, so they are all located within the same category, the same block of memories. These are very narrow blocks and they are pretty specific. Search system is very trick and smart.

I will explain the reason why I think so, also you can try the same experiment. When you wake up and you cannot recall some part of your dream or maybe you do not recall anything at all – try to think of absolutely random words and events, try to think of everything that you see around you, name those items in your head. If you cannot do that, try picking a vocabulary and open it on random pages, read any random words. You will most definitely meet upon one word that will make you remember some part of your dream, some chain of events that will pull the rest of the memories back and you will remember part or the whole dream.

How to understand forgotten memories?
I will take this picture as an example. Memory of something is a formation of neurons, the stronger the connected the better the memory is. So strong memories are seen as clear memories, weaker memories with weaker connections between neurons in a formation are memories which are being deleted, the process is slow, they are getting more and more transparent, to a point where you cannot identify them, where you cannot clearly see what is there. However they still exist, they are there, they are just very weak. If you somehow focus on it, something remind you of it, you will pull it back, you will stimulate that formation of neurons so it will become strong again.

Some people say we have some kind of RAM memory if compared to a computer. I do not think so, but you can clearly understand why it seems so. When memory is getting weaker, it does exist somewhere and it does not exist for us at the same time. It is very weak so we cannot see it, so it is a temporarily stored information that might be lost some day, or it might be brought back to life.

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The process of forgetting, is it possible to control it?
According to science the process of how our brain chooses which memory to delete and which to keep it completely unknown. It is known that more important memories do get stronger while less important memories do get weaker.
That happens mostly during the night, when we sleep, mostly during first phases of sleep. To be exact, before every REM cycle.
My idea was to observe and try to feel and understand when exactly it happens and how long it takes and how to manipulate it.

Of course I have no idea how to stop that process physically, so the only way for me was to try to stop that mentally. I did a series of experiments with my lucid dreams memories. My goal was to wake up and choose which memory to delete, if I had 3 dreams I would pick one to forget and 2 to remain. I did succeed in my first attempt. I woke up and I recalled 4 dreams (3 DILD’s and 1 DEILD), out of 4 dreams I picked to delete the first one, the first DILD lucid dream. I just thought of it as unimportant and boring dream, thought that I do not need to pay attention to it. Magic number here seems to be 10 minutes. It takes only 10 minutes to forget that dream completely, after 10 minutes I could not recall a single moment from that dream.
More, 10 minutes is a magic number in many situations concerning memories. When you wake up it takes around 10 minute to stay awake where you cannot comeback to the same dream you were before. Also when you wake up you have around 10 minutes to rewind everything what you remember from your dreams before those memories fade away, as soon as you look through them during those 10 minutes you do make them stronger.
So here is one way to control this process, there are others.

Is it possible to stop forgetting absolutely everything? Are there any limits to how much we can remember?
I am afraid I do not want to test that out, I believe there are some limits of how much we can remember per day or week and more. The day when I recalled all my lucid dreaming starting from nREM WILD and ending with all morning DEILD’s, the same morning I had difficulties remembering of the yesterday events. And I felt pretty tired that morning, like I worked on some hard math equation for a long time.
I could test this and make an experiment, but I do not feel like I want to do this now. Maybe one day when I get older and I will have nothing more to do :)

Hope you liked reading it, leave your comments and suggestions. As always any response is welcome :)