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Comment by babelfish | Hacker News Reader

> Sleep loss, specifically dream loss, leads to an overfitted brain that can still memorize and learn but fails to generalize appropriately

Curious where this claim came from. Obviously a lack of sleep will degrade your day-to-day performance, but I almost never have dreams.

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From what I recall, everybody dreams an approximately equal amount of time every night, the only major difference is how much of it is forgotten when you wake up.

I wish I recalled (..or saved) the paper, but waking up releases a chemical in the brain that makes you actively and quickly forget what you just dreamed about.

That’s interesting. I’ve noticed that if I forget a dream and then meditate later in the day it often comes back or at least bits and pieces do some 5-15 minutes into the meditation.

Without very, very strong evidence, that's BS, or more politely put: a retroactive fit of the concept to the operationalization, in this case probably the REM observation which vaguely correlates with dreaming.

Or you just don’t remember them.

It's a very distinct feeling waking up thinking "I did not dream last night" vs "I had a dream last night but don't remember it" IMO

Do you have any evidence for that. It's very likely you had dreams with both experiences but just didn't realise it.

It seems more likely that the brain has some kind of retention filter on dreams to try to sort the random useless signals from, for example when you deduce the structure of the benzene molecule. Probably all humans dream every night, unless there's some major issue with sleep, but only dreams passing the filter are remembered. Those on the threshold are "remembered as existing" but not the content.

I think that probably has more to do with how recently you were in REM sleep (which is when most dreams occur). If you have the sensation of waking up from a dream, whether you remember it or not, you likely woke up from REM sleep. If you don't think you dreamt at all, then perhaps you just were in REM sleep much earlier during your sleep.

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