Thread: Question about dream recall

Often when I wake up in the morning I can sort of remember something from one or more dreams. I feel like the memories is just below the surface and I can almost transform them to words, but not quite. It's just like the feeling of having something on the tip of your tung. If i stop thinking about the dream for just a few moments, the memories of it are washed away, and I have no chance of recovering them.

How can the memories from a dream be so different from normal waking memory? Why can we often remember dreams in the morning, but if you try to remember the same dream later in the day, it's all gone? Why are we built like this? Can it be a self defence mechanism in the mind, so that we don't mix memories from dreams with real life memories?

This is very fascinating stuff. If anyone have some info or research results on dream memory, please share :-)