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Comment by dwighttk | Hacker News Reader

Well. I don’t (or very rarely) remember my dreams. Hope I get the protection anyway.

I used to dream a lot and then it all stopped, especially when the pandemic started and I became less physically active. Long story short, It turns out I have a severe sleep apnea and it became more pronounced when my physical activity went down significantly (aka I was less tired). Few days later after i started using my CPAP machine my dreams came back. Make sure you don't have sleep apnea, about 7-8% of people have it.

Out of curiosity, are you a frequent cannabis user? I found I didn't remember my dreams when I smoked cannabis, however after a long break I started to remember dreams vividly.

I personally hardly ever use cannabis, and often oscillate between periods of distinctly remembering all my dreams to having weeks of seemingly dreamless sleep. The oscillations have gotten especially wild in post-lockdown pandemic life.

Yup. I smoked pretty heavily for two years and didnt really dream at all during that time. Outside of those two years I've always had pretty vivid dreams.

A dream journal really does help though. The last thing most people want to do when sleepy is write though.

Interesting - I pretty much never remember my dreams. I only started smoking/edibles fairly recently in life and one side effect was if I take an edible in the evening I almost always remember them.

Nope.

The only time I seem to remember dreams is when my sleep is disturbed. Most nights I go to sleep and wake up in the morning, no (remembered)dream. If something wakes me up like indigestion or needing to pee I’ll often remember a dream.

This is the exact same for me. Only a disturbance in my sleep allows me to even remember that I had a dream at all.

I can confirm dreamless nights on cannabis and vice-versa.

Probably.

But if you want to remember your dreams again, this is something you can work/train with. Basically, every morning before getting up, not jump up with the alarm out of bed, but rather ly still, in the same position as before and try to remember. If you want to, have a dream diary. Doing so a few days, should bring your memory of your dreams back.

I used to do so to train my ability for active/lucid dreaming. Can be fun ...

(but now with a toddler and a baby I lack the time and focus)

I’d say about once a month I’m dreaming as I wake up and the dream quickly fades... but if I had a dream journal there’d be something to write down.

Every other morning there’s nothing.

I often remember the dream right when I wake up, but if I don't immediately focus on remembering it (e.g. while writing it down), later in the day I almost magically won't remember even what the general topic was.

You can also write down your dreams if you wake after a dream in the middle of the night. The downside is you might start waking up frequently to write down your dreams.

Anecdotally some b6/b12 supplements have given both me and my partner very intense dreams and vivid recall. No idea what the mechanism might be (Or if it's a preservative/etc) but potentially an interesting data point?

I’ve heard Stilton cheese has a similar effect. (Haven’t tried)

Also whatever malaria drug I took was supposed to have intense dreams as a side effect. (Don’t remember any)

IIRC the cheese thing is basically a myth, any heavy food in your stomach when you sleep will cause you to sleep less deeply, wake more often, and consequently, remember more of your dreams.

Makes sense... I usually only remember dreams when my sleep is disturbed so this matches up.

Funny that some medications have these dream effects. An uncommon side effect of Montelukast is vivid nightmares and sleep paralysis. It’s a relativity common asthma control medication, but was recently moved to a not-recommended status for younger people because of this side effect. My personal experience was pretty intense nightmares 1-2 times a week if I took it before bed. Taking early in the day stopped this side effect.

Particularly the P5P form of vitamin b6 will cause pretty crazy and vivid dreams

Try changing your room temperature by a degree or two. This makes a big impact for me.

Changing it up or down?

Try both.

Of course. Articles such as the "OP" are simplistic bollocks. For starters, you'd be completely blind by now if the article had any merit. And deaf. And lost all memory.

Oh no, wait: we open our eyes every morning, so even if there was any effect, it would be the opposite: visual taking over everything else. Which also doesn't happen.

So take it with a grain of salt: yet another unprovable "theory" about the brain.

Have you stopped to think for a second where science would be if every possible hypothesis was thrown out as soon as its inventor realized he couldn't conclusively prove it in a day?

Also exactly the fact that it hasn't been fully proved out yet is why the nuance is missing. But now all the sudden you want them to be able to give you an explanation of the nuanced mechanism that prevents visual from taking over everything else? (Plus why on earth would it? What are you even talking about? I'm seeing all day long, but I'm also smelling hearing touching and tasting) Make up your mind!

1. If it's just a hypothesis, write it up in a journal, don't put it in Time magazine.

2. The hypothesis is as unprovable as they come: not only do we not have any idea on how this process of taking over other brain areas would work, if you knew how it worked, you couldn't build brains that lack this mechanism but are identical for the rest, and set up an experiment in which half of the brains (modified and original) would dream and the rest wouldn't. Because that seems to be about the only experiment that could truly falsify this idea.

3. It doesn't explain why only the visual cortex is susceptible to this, when we know that other brain areas also can adapt. The argument "it's dark" doesn't cut the mustard, because the effect should go away as soon as we open our eyes, which is around 2/3rds of the day. BTW, babies can't see, so it's odd that so many of them manage to develop a normally functioning visual cortex.

4. Sleep inhibits the senses, so how can the areas they input to take over, and why don't their areas get taken over?

5. They don't even attempt to prove that REM sleep and REM sleep alone activates the visual cortex and only that.

> Make up your mind!

That was under the assumption that the hypothesis was true. It seems to lead to rather unintuitive predictions. And I do like a theory to not be in apparent contradiction with simple observations.

So no, I have no reason to take it seriously, and people that (think they) don't dream shouldn't worry.

Don’t worry, I’m not worried.

I hear a lot about people struggling with sleep and so I recognize that it is probably a widespread problem, but I sleep like a rock most nights and have little to no stress about it.

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