Question: Roughly how many dreams do you have every night?

Alex Reid answered on 6 Nov 2018:

Hi thank you for your great question. Dreams are really really hard to measure, and as scientists we rely on our measurements (we can’t really work without them!). Your question touches on some of these problems. How would we define (i.e. split up) different dreams for counting? Dreams are often continuous but change topics quickly. You can also actually dream at any point in your sleep cycle and this can also influence the types of dream you have. Another huge issue is that to count dreams we would have to wake people up to ask them and that would disrupt the dream! If this wasn’t enough of a problem we also have the issue that people forget dreams very quickly and don’t always report them accurately. For all these reasons (and more) it is almost impossible to accurately tell how many dreams you might have during sleep, at least until we develop better technology to measure them. For now, instead of counting dreams psychologists tend to explore related questions. This includes the relationship between dream content and waking life events, how dreams change across the sleep cycle, and the relationship between dreams and mental health. The work continues!