Number of Dreams

Well, I'm new here, I've read through the main site, though am still looking through all the posts on the boards, which are quite interesting, even took a look at the LD goggles. I've been keeping some dream logs, starting Monday, I woke up and wrote several paragraphs, and last night I woke up around 5am, I heard something making noise, guess I am a light sleeper, dunno. Well I woke up around 5am from this dream, and I ended up writing a load on it, like 10 paragraphs, so I can remember a lot when I have a dream, but not always. Anyways, most of the dreams I have consist of different parts. Dont know really how to explain it, besides jumping frome scene to scene, for instance the one I had last night was where I was at my old house listening to music, and then suddely I was in the woods, in this pond on a boat that kept flipping over...odd. Well there are several parts like that in my dreams, so the point of this thread is I read earlier about how you are pretty good off if you can remember 4 or 5 dreams a night. Well, what constitutes an individual dream? Each REM stage? Or different parts like I expalined above? I'm just trying to figure out how you are supposed to seperate each dream, if that makes sense.

its a feeling i guess.... for me anyway...
when i can't link the diffrent parts i assume their diffrent dreams but it does not really matter... the point is being able to remmber as much as you can from your dreams...

ah ok, well i guess that makes sense, because i can usually remember some pretty graphic details, especially if it's about a person.

I normally count each REM stage and I don't normally remeber anything the first one or two. I get lazy a lot so my recall isn't normally that great, but I have had really good recall at other times.

All them little dreams are normally connected. You need to have good recall and go through the dream in your mind to catch it though. If its bad you might not even remeber they where in the same dream stage. Say the dream you had last night, you where in the house, maybe you looked out the window and saw a forest, then your inside the forest. Thats all it takes, a short glance and your in a new area. Then since its connected I don't really count it as a new dream.

Well i've never heard about having several dreams per nights, unless of course you wake up in between each dream, so it only makes sense to call them one dream, unless you were switching from an REM stage or something which would make it a technicality.

Its really hard to remeber anything from a dream if you don't wake up after it. So when you wake up in the morning and you remeber a bunch of different stuff, its normally all in the same REM cycle. Its kind of like spinning or going through a mirror and your in a new area. Its a different places but you never woke up so its the same dream.

so its only possible to have one dream per REM period. how many REM periods are there again? does your mind erase the dreams in the previous REM, even if you didnt wake up?

You go through about 5 cycles a night, so you could have 5 dreams. Your mind normally does erase the dreams though some times you can still remeber a little. I wouldn't count on remebering it though, because its hard and you might not remeber much of anything.

Each sleep cycle is like 90 minutes I think. So from one dream to the next is a really long time. If I don't write down a dream within like 5-10 minutes I forget almost all of it, trying to remeber it with no help 90 minutes later on top of remebering a new dream is almost impossible.

The REM stage gets longer the longer you sleep, so when you start its like 20 minutes of the 90 minute cycle. On the last cycle before you wake up its like over an hour. So if you dream for an hour you can fit a lot of stuff in there, and it might change a lot during that time so you get them little mini dreams.

Also some people do count them as a new dreams if they change. I know some people say they remeber 7 dreams a night or something, so I have to think their counting one dream more than once. Doesn't really matter as long as you know chances are if you didn't wake up its the same dream. I would say remebering 3 dreams a night is good recall.

ah thats pretty cool then. thanks. going to be looking into more stuff around here, like this forum so far.