Dream Confusion

Last night before going to bed I stumbled upon this site.
I was listening to Coast to Coast AM as I always do from 1AM to 3AM. A caller on the show brought up reading a book that taught him how to control his dreams, and I became so interested that I began my research online.

I read through the entire site and decided to work on my dream recall.
I have alwasy been very good at remember my dreams. Amazingly enough, after reading through the site, it stimulated my brain to wake-up in order for me to record my dreams.

I woke-up after 3 hours of sleep, so technically I should have had about 2 lucid dreams. However, I remember 4 different dreams. My confusion is based around the fact that I am not sure if I just remembered one dream that had many different unrelated scenes/aspects to it, or did I have 4 separate dreams that I remembered.

I fell asleep after jotting these dreams down, and when I woke again in the morning after an additional 4 hours of sleep, I remembered another 4 dreams.

As previously stated, my question is...am I remembering one dream that had many different aspects to it, or did I have 4 (8 througout the whole night) separate dreams that I remembered?

Hey Miss H, welcome!

Well, I think it comes down to what you interpret a "dream" as. Is a dream one REM period in which there is a single story line, or plot, during the entire time? Or is a dream the entire REM period itself?

I think what you experienced was likely a combo - since dreams themselves are pretty ambiguous as to where one "starts" and "ends". Then there are those moments during the night in which we wake up, very briefly, and fall back asleep which we don't remember. We'll often fall right back into another dream.

So, in the 3 hours of sleep example, I think you probably had a couple awakenings during the two "dream periods". This essentially split up your dreams into halves.

For example,
lets say you spent 15 minutes in REM the first time, then 25 the next. Within the first period, you may have had a five minute dream, a short awakening, followed by another 10 minutes of dreaming. Your next REM period of 25 may have been split up in the same way, by a short awakening that you can't recall.

In all you had two sleep cycles (1 and a half hours each) - yet experienced 4 dreams.
I hope that sorta helps ya :)