During our downtime, when we’re not working and our minds wander, we often find ourselves pondering questions. One question that keeps popping into my head is, “How are dreams made?” I’ve looked around different forums to try to understand it. While we’re not completely sure about the answer, I have one theory that makes sense to me.

When we’re awake, we remember lots of things, like the color of a passing car or how our friend’s nose is different from others. Each memory is made up of tiny details, kind of like putting together a picture one piece at a time.

When we go to sleep, our bodies rest and heal while our minds keep working, but not as much as during the day. So what happens then? Well, there’s something called the REM stage, which is when we have most of our dreams and remember them best. During this stage, our brains decide which memories from the day to keep and which to forget. They also decide which memories to keep forever.

As our brains go through all the details of the day, they try to make sense of them by creating a story. That’s why our dreams can seem so random—we might be in a park one moment and on a train platform the next. It’s hard for our brains to make a perfect story out of all these pieces of memory.

This is why it’s hard to remember dreams when we wake up. We might remember them right away, but then they fade quickly because they weren’t real memories—they were just made up by our brains.

Think of each memory as having a ranking. The more we think about a memory, the higher its ranking gets. For example, when we get a new phone number, we repeat it to ourselves so we remember it. But if we don’t think about it for a while, we might forget it.

So next time you wake up from a dream, write it down and try to figure out why you dreamt about certain things. You might start to see connections between them.

Disclaimer: These are just my thoughts on how dreams might work. It’s possible that I’m wrong, but I’m sharing what I think anyway.