First of all, let me thank those of you who have written in passed on your queries about dreaming. Please continue to do so, and Kathy & I will do our best to respond in this column to those communications which seem to us to be of greatest potential interest to us all. This time, the question: is it true that we tend to remember less from our dreaming as we age?
The handful of statistical studies focused on the question of declining dream recall as we age all say pretty much the same thing - most people tend to remember less of their dreaming as they age.
However, we must take into account that these studies are all fairly carefully designed to be "random," in order to best reflect the general population of aging people as a whole, and for that reason specifically avoid any consideration of things like gender, psycho-spiritual sophistication, or religious attitude in the people they "sample."
My experience is that people who have gotten into the habit of paying regular attention to their dreams do not necessarily fall as easily into this general pattern of declining dream recall as they/we age.
My own experience, for example, is that I continue to average 0.9± remembered dreams per calendar day, just as I have since beginning to keep a serious dream journal, more than 50 years ago. I am, as of this writing, 28 remembered dreams away from the "landmark" of recording, titling, and working to some degree or another with 17,000 of my own dreams. In a few weeks I will turn 72 years old, and I suspect that by that time I have every reason to suppose that I will have moved beyond this "landmark" cumulative total.
However, as we age, it is also the case, in my experience, that we also tend to fall more and more deeply into mostly unconscious patterns of thought and feeling with regard to our remembered dreams.
At the top of this list of unquestioned mental habits is the assumption that we remember "a dream," (singular), and that these separate, single dreams arrive in waking memory more or less sequentially, and have settings, characters, a "plot," as well as a number of feelings and emotions that are woven into this repeating pattern of experience.
I am increasingly convinced that this habit of mind about the experience of dreaming and remembering dreams is quite limiting. I strongly suspect that we all are dreaming countless numbers of seemingly separate dreams simultaneously. I am also currently drawn to believe that the "big deal" here is not dreaming in this fashion, (all the evidence points to the fact that we are all doing this all the time, awake and asleep), but rather that it is the ability to remember this increasing awareness of multiple dreams that is the most important marker of the evolution of individual consciousness.
I now know that I dream multiple "different dreams" simultaneously... I mention this here because remembering multiple different simultaneous dream realities is markedly more difficult than remembering seemingly singular dreams in order, one at a time.
More often than not these days, I awaken directly from dreaming and have great difficulty in "deciding what dream(s) to remember," because my interest in remembering as much as possible from the whole complex experience is generally greater than my desire to form clear memories of any seemingly single dream... and at this point, I am still unable to do both, except on rare occasions.
I still have days when I awaken with what appears to be the dissolving remnants of a "single dream," but more and more that sense is accompanied by an equally strong sense that much more than that was going on just a split second before....
I am also convinced that the ability to recall more than one dream at once upon awakening is a very reliable indicator that my own waking consciousness is evolving more and more in the direction of compassion.
As far as I can tell, the irreducible factor in compassionate awareness is the ability to hold other people's worldviews and individual attitudes and feelings consciously in mind, while not losing track of my own. This interior "juggling act" is symbolically reflected in the ability to remember "more than one dream and once."
My experience is that many people are evolving in this similar direction. I believe it is a natural consequence of leading an increasingly spiritually focused and aware life. However - paradoxically - this evolution of consciousness toward greater and greater "distributed awareness," both awake and asleep, creates periods where the dreams themselves are increasingly difficult to remember upon awakening...
As you can see, this casts a whole new light on the statistics about how we generally seem to have an increasingly difficult time remembering our dreams as we age. I offer this thought here, both as a potential source of comfort for dreamers who are experiencing increasing frustration in their habits of dream recall, and as a suggestion about how to possibly transform that frustration into increased recall by examining and hopefully releasing whatever unconscious habits may be limiting our ability to recall our increasingly complex dreaming.
-Jeremy
