On the morning of Saturday, September 19th, 2026, I woke up to pray the morning prayer, Fajr, at around 6:00 AM. After praying, I went back to sleep for an hour and a half, knowing I had to get up again to run some errands. After waking up again, I noticed that the dream I had in that short time was so vividly clear to me that it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt like it happened right now, as a part of my actual life. It was weird. I didn’t remember a single thing that happened in my dream at night, but the dream I had in this short period was like a part of my memory. It was a dream of two TV shows I had watched some years ago, their storylines mixed perfectly into one story that somehow made sense but didn’t at the same time, and in it I was a character, perfectly synced to the story, as if I was supposed to be in it. It was quite the weird phenomenon.
According to Dement and Kleitman’s study in 1957, the reason why any dreams I had during the night didn’t stay while the one I had during the 1.5 hour nap did was because my sleep cycle was going through the REM stage at that moment. Sleep is essentially divided into 2 stages, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement). The REM period occurs roughly every 90 minutes across the night and especially right before a person wakes up. Since dreams usually occur during that stage, waking up at that time allows a person to vividly recall being in a dream and roughly what type of dream they were having before it fades from memory, even though the brain’s memory-recording mechanisms are not running during the REM stage (Stickgold 2005).
But ironically, me describing this dream is itself a reconstruction, not a factual replay of what my dream actually was; essentially, it’s my biased view of my dream. As I said before, the storylines of the two TV shows being mixed into one story that made sense but also didn’t proves that the brain tries to take the chaotic, mixed-up ideas formed during the REM stage and blend them into a story that makes sense of the fragmented parts, which would better be called confabulating, the act of unconsciously creating false memories to fill in gaps in memory. It’s sort of similar to how you would give an AI model a bunch of fragmented information for it to create a perfectly smooth narrative linking it all together. The study of dreams, oneirology, is a field where the main source of information is taken from someone’s account which cannot be taken as an accurate source. However, with proper measures put in place, with standardized collection, a person’s account can be taken as accurate to a certain degree (Domhoff 2000).
From this, we can understand that, in general, self-reported accounts of an experience, which may not necessarily be a dream but could be a reported incident, more often than not have a bias. Which is why it’s always worth asking, how much of a recounted story or experience is factual and how much is a reconstructed, biased point of view.
References
Dement, William, and Nathaniel Kleitman. 1957. “The Relation of Eye Movements during Sleep to Dream Activity: An Objective Method for the Study of Dreaming.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 53 (5): 339–346. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-relation-of-eye-movements-during-sleep-to-dream-Dement-Kleitman/7a17858ad40a01e462907ce961a3346fdb51d848
Domhoff, G. William. 2000. “Methods and Measures for the Study of Dream Content.” Dream Library, University of California, Santa Cruz. Accessed September 20, 2026. https://dreams.ucsc.edu/Library/domhoff_2000a.html
Stickgold, Robert. 2005. “Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation.” Nature 437 (7063): 1272–1278. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04286
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