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Dreaming and dreams are a highly individual matter, so comparing the experiences of one person to another does not necessarily come in handy for figuring out what is "normal" or ideal. But it is still fascinating.

Someone who wakes up during REM may immediately remember what was going on in his head, without even trying. When PAP therapy improves sleep quality for someone, those incidences may lessen in frequency for him. So his recalling dreams may take more effort, if he happens to want to remember dreams for some reason. It is my opinion that a dream does not have to be remembered consciously to be a useful occurrence, but I understand why some would miss recalling dreams if that is what they are used to.

Some who have wanted to recall dreams have found it useful to remember not to move when they first wake up in the morning. Most of us jump up and fight with an alarm clock the instant we awaken, and that tends to erase dream recall for some reason. But if a person wakes up but continues to lie perfectly still in the same position while peacefully attempting to recall dreams for a few moments, he may find success at it. No one knows why that is, because very little is understood about sleep, let alone dreams, scientifically speaking.

Our waking patterns of thinking are influenced by personal experience and culture, so it seems likely that dreams are as much about personal experience and culture as anything else; most of what has been written on the subject, or filmed, is more about speculation than hard science, in my opinion. A dream can't be accessed without the translation/interpretation of the dreamer "reporting" the dream, and the translation/interpretation ends up being more telling than the mental images themselves.

RogerSC wrote:... But the content of the dreams kind of floats away pretty quickly, which is just fine with me.

A trick for this, should you ever be interested to try it, is when you first wake up to lay in bed absolutely still and spend a few moments asking yourself "Was I just dreaming?" and focusing on the feelings and emotions you just had as you were waking up. It can help you remember the dream before it fades away.

If you don't remeber dreaming its a good thing because then you are asleep. If you remember dreaming your being kicked out of sleep or you are in a light sleep mode. If you have death related dreams then something is going wrong and your not breathing right.

johnthomasmacdonald wrote:dreams - I maybe remember one dream every year or so - I thought that this would change with the cpap treatment but even though I'm sleeping MUCH better with my bipap machine and my z-scores are good ( although not as good as Cosmo's - shakes fist in Cosmo's general direction - ) showing that i spend a lot of time in REM sleep and about an hour each night in deep sleep ( always in the first couple of hours of sleep), i still never remember dreaming

anyone else have the same "problem?" and did it get better over time with cpap treatment?

Mostly I would expect recalled dreams on CPAP to be less because, as other posters have said, the quality of sleep is better and the sleep is not being interrupted by periods of not breathing. I believe fewer recalled dreams suggests you are sleeping better. Sorry if you miss them!

BlackSpinner wrote:You won't remember your REM dreams if you don't wake up from them. They are not written to your longer term memory unless you wake.

Finally had a dream or maybe it was the only one I could remember since cpap. It was during the REM stage and I woke up while in the dream. The Zeo was pretty accurate.