Dream Recall Often Imperfect

CHICAGO (Reuters Health) - Are we reliable witnesses to our own dreams? Not very, according to research presented here at the annual meeting of the Associated Sleep Societies.

Our ability to recall details of dreams is as rife with errors as are eyewitness reports of actual events, said Dr. William Moorcroft of the Sleep and Dreaming Laboratory at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

``Our dream recall, even immediately after the dream is experienced, is not as accurate as we think it is, and we may not capture as much of the original dream as researchers who try to understand dreams had assumed,'' Moorcroft said. ''Furthermore, our dream recall changes with time, so it's the same psychological process that happens when we're awake.''

Moorcroft and his colleagues studied 14 people who were awakened from early morning rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when dreams are most numerous and vivid. They were asked to recall, and record on audiotape, the dream they were having when awakened.

They were asked to recall the same dream the next morning, a week later and a month later. Comparison of the components of the four tape-recorded recall sessions revealed that, on average, only half of the dream components were recalled in any one of the four sessions. However, the ``gist'' of the dream was recalled perfectly over time, the researchers note.

Of the dream elements recalled immediately following REM sleep awakening (thought by most researchers to deliver the most accuracy), people were able to recall fewer than 44% of events in any of the subsequent sessions.

``We're convinced, in taking a look at these four recalls for each dream, that you can recognize the essential story in each of these. So it's not that the changes are so dramatic...but rather the changes are in the specific components, and these...components do vary over time; some are recalled, some are added and some are lost,'' he explained.

Moorcroft concludes that these data should prompt researchers and therapists and others who work with dream interpretation to ``exercise a level of caution, and not to assume that the recall is the dream...and realize that we can't be as exact about our theories about what dreams are for and about.''

He added that when it comes to understanding dreams, ''there's no other way currently available to get at content other than asking for recall. Dream recall also influences our understanding of the process of dreaming.''

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