Thread: How Many Dreams On Average Do You Have Per Night?

It depends. Sometimes I have dreams that appear to chain throughout the night but are different enough in terms of what happens that if feels right to separate them into their own little thing. Often there's a break in between them that is psychologically perceptible even if nothing has stopped the dream, I just don't know. This gap may be the result of stress, poor memory in remembering the dream or difficulty in staying aware as it is going, so I witness chunks of something and miss more of it when I wake up. Naturally the more "vivid" a dream the longer I can focus on the story and more likely I'll end up labeling the event as one long dream. If a story is short and simple then a dream is anything that happens before I woke up.

Since stress plays a huge role in the amount of dreams I can remember, I'd say I average around 2-3 dreams a night. Recall crashes once I'm stressed and luckily I'll have it in me to remember the shortest of dreams, if anything.

Right now? I’m not exactly sure what it would be. My average week has a few mornings with early awakenings and at least a couple of late nights, and if things line up wrong, I may have to spend half my week catching up on sleep.

Honestly, I haven’t been all that concerned with figuring out what my average would be for a while now. I was more interested in that kind of thing back when I first started recording my dreams every night, and after a couple years of that, I calculated that my average was around 2-3 a night, using both sudden changes in dream setting and awakenings as the dividing points. I think that’s probably how most people think about it, and it usually works out, although there are some dreams it might make sense to make exceptions for (a dream scenario that seems to continue right where it left off after waking up, for example, or a series of short, discontinuous scenes).

I guess whether it would make sense to do that depends on why you’re keeping track of dream recall, though. If it’s for the sake of improving recall, word count may be a better measure since working on improving it makes you think about your dreams in a more focused way, whereas you could set an alarm to go off every hour and wind up with more dreams recalled, but without having accomplished anything except proving to yourself that you really do have that many in a night.

Three or four on average.