I don't have dreams

Most of the time I don't have dreams. Instead I have a time skip, like in some video games. I fall asleep, and then I wake up in the morning. It doesn't bother me much, but I feel that I miss something when others talk about their dreams. What can I do to have dreams instead of the time skip?

Dreams happen during REM sleep, and don't stick in your memory on their own; you have to basically write down the dream in your memory as you are waking up. So one possibility is that you are having dreams, but not right before you wake up, so you don't remember them. Since sleep cycles have predictable time patterns, you could try to time when you wake up vs when you fall asleep to line up with a period of likely dreaming. Keep a notepad by your bed and jot down some notes if you wake up and remember anything from a dream, sometimes you can sort of wake up remembering a dream, but then forget it after you fall back asleep. If you use cannabis, you could try stopping for a while, though that might not be relevant.

I find that people who don't remember dreams tend to have what I'd call a high filter for nonsense. As a kid we are subject to a multitude of wordless nonsense thoughts and scenarios and daydreams, and (one) theory has demonstrated/hypothesized that these sorts of thoughts are basically a prerequisite for sleep. It's what allows (or sometimes more forces) us to stay awake even when our body is chemically signalling for sleep and we are in bed. Our body in addition to receiving sleepy time hormones, also does a mental check to ensure whatever is going on up in our head is basically appropriately nonsense and unfocused as a final check before knocking out. This was evolutionary advantageous (and also only able to develop in our big brains) as it means if we are doing something very important or something isn't right our sleepy time part of our brain checks our pre frontal cortex and goes "not yet" as oppose to us just lying down and knocking out. This rarely in the short term poses a health problem because lack of sleep inherently will eventually cause thoughts to become nonsense, dreamlike, and unfocused, and thus we will be forced to sleep eventually. You can look up the "cognitive shuffle" exercise and follow the trains of links for more info on this. In short you do actually always have dreams they just don't contain information your brain values at the moment. When you first wake your brain has the option to throw it into short term recall, and from there you have the option to throw it into long term. There is numerous factors influencing this in my opinion. The stronger your ability to think in ways apart from an "internal worded monologue" the longer a dream can be held for you to make sense of and put into words or images and commit to longer term memory. To get back to the nonsense filter thing, fundamentally your brain has to extract value from dreams and in general "nonsense thought" to bother even remembering it to a point you even realize it happened. I think personally from asking friends and people online this is based in part on how supportive, neutral, or disapproving those around you growing up were of childlike ramblings and daydreams or dream talk in general. And then it is also based on whether your current environment is supportive of such things. I tend to find certain artists remember dreams better not because they are more creative but if their work is based on dreams or spontaneous incoherent ideas and scenarios and images. Their brain makes an attempt to remember such things because it has been valuable to. People I talk to in stem fields tend to report dreaming less not because stem kills creativity but because incoherent nonsensical ideas and scenarios are seen as stupid or unimportant by their peers and higher ups. I find people who like coming up with little random "bits" remember dreams better. I find people who get a bit irritated with them remember less. Likely in my opinion because as a kid or even now the people around them would find it stupid or irritating when they would delve into some childlike rambling about imaginary characters. Writing down helps because it signals to your brain that there is something important about what it's cooked up when you first wake instead of tossing it. But in my armchair opinion the reason you don't remember them right now is because starting whenever your dreams began to stop, someone or your environment ceased rewarding you or tolerating that sort of thought. For many its simply when they begin to "grow up" and are expected to value more logical, planning oriented thinking and cease actions or talk based around the kind of intrusive random wordless thinking. Especially with boys. So what I also find helps is exercises that allow the mind to wander, meditation can be helpful with this but isn't inherently. Meditation shuts out thoughts that interfere with this sort of thinking (anxieties, worries, planning, etc.) but doesn't inherently support the sort of thinking im talking about. Things like the cognitive shuffle I mentioned earlier help support it and also help with sleep, and I also find partaking in stream of conscious writing or drawing when awake can also help (if you can avoid falling into a spiral of intrusive worries).

>>7495 You may be interested to hear that lucid dreaming is correlated with Openness (the big five personality score) which is meant to include aspects of openmindedness. (anti-correlated with agreeableness, also correlated with neuroticism but just because it increases the frequency of nightmares)

>>7496 In an even more armchair sense to me that makes sense because part of openness I think comes from not shooting down your own thoughts from within or over censoring your internal world. We usually apply our self censors and filters to others, the thoughts or ideas we think are too stupid to pay mind to we often reject connecting over with others as well. Its the same reason I think many often stop remembering dreams as they grow as kids are full of stupid whimsical ideas that many parents will increasingly get tired with and begin to berate or shut down not really of any fault of their own. The adult sees some fantasy or thought or daydream as just clearly objectively unhelpful, distracting, immature and begins to share their own filter with the child. I was gonna say this but didnt want to go too off the deep end with it but the people I know who remember dreams the least have one of two things (or both) in common which the first is parents who made them feel stupid as a child (directly or indirectly). The second is a lack of interaction with other children in their early years. I assume with the second it maybe has to do with the fact that dreams and playing pretend and imagining in general are valuable in bonding with other kids when you are very young. I lived with someone who had both of these things working against them and in our first years they would often get outraged or shocked that I would even think of certain things let alone draw them or speak them. It took them a long time to sort of realize that just thinking about or entertaining something stupid or bad or that they simply didnt agree with wasn't going to make everyone think they were a freak or an idiot or any number of things im sure they had hurled at them from their parents.