In this video Victoria S. Dorsano explains why remembering dreams matters, citing historical examples and scientific studies that show dreaming aids memory consolidation, emotional processing, and creative problem‑solving. She describes the core challenge of dream recall—timing the awakening during the brief REM window before the brain fully files memories— and argues that conventional alarms cannot target this stage. The Muse S Athena headband, which uses EEG to detect brain activity, offers a “Dream Recall” mode that looks for the last REM cycle and plays a pre‑selected sound cue. Victoria walks through the setup: defining a latest wake‑up time, choosing a one‑hour dream‑recall window, and selecting a continuous or intermittent cue (she used crickets). The cue is rehearsed before sleep so it becomes a recognizable marker within the dream, not a wake‑up alarm. Over two weeks she reports that the cue consistently appeared in her dreams, giving her moments of lucidity and allowing her to record dream content. She notes mild, short‑lived grogginess from waking during REM, less severe than waking from deep sleep, and advises alternating Dream Recall with the standard smart‑wake feature. She cautions users with frequent nightmares, as recalling distressing dreams can be emotionally taxing. Finally, she recommends the beta to existing Muse S Athena owners, suggests sticking with one cue per week, and invites viewers to share their own dream experiences.
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Did you know that director James Cameron came up with the movie The Terminator from a dream? I'm a dream. Yeah, he had a fever in a hotel in Rome, and he dreamed of a chrome skeleton dragging itself out of a fire. Mary Shelley, half asleep in Geneva, saw the scene in her mind that became Frankenstein. And Larry Page actually had a dream about downloading the entire internet, and that became Google. None of those stories are about just remembering a dream. They're about catching them. All these things came into fruition because those individuals were able to catch their dream and record it before it went poof, like it does for so many of us. You see, you'll probably dream about 4 to 6 times tonight, and by breakfast, all those memories will be gone. So for the past 2 weeks, I've been trying to catch my own dreams by using this headband that reads my brainwaves and wakes me up mid-dream. Yes, on purpose. Now, this is the Muse S Athena, and I've done videos on this before. But why would you actually want this to wake you up in the middle of your dreams? Well, because dreams aren't just noise that your brain makes while the lights are off. While you're dreaming, your brain is actually doing 3 jobs at once. Number one, it's filing your day into long-term memory. Number two, it's taking the emotional charge off of things that happen to you throughout the day. And number three, it's shuffling ideas into combinations you would never really think of while you're awake. Because simply put, the part of you that is monitoring these ideas and would say, that's stupid to combine those things together, that part of your brain is off duty while you're sleeping. More in particular, while you're in REM stage sleep. And that last one is where it gets interesting. You see, there's a really interesting study I keep coming back to here. Researchers gave people a set of math problems. with a hidden shortcut buried in them, then let the participants doze off in the chair. Turns out, anyone who spent even 15 seconds in that first kind of drifting stage of sleep was 3 times more likely to spot the shortcut. And even more interesting, that effect seemed to vanish if they fell all the way asleep. So participants that were too awake, nothing. Too far under their sleep spell, also nothing. So there seemed to be this kind of window of clarity that's pretty narrow. Some might even call that lucid dreaming. So that's interesting in itself, but then there was another group of years later that did something pretty crazy. They played a chosen sound right as people were drifting off to steer what they dreamed about. And those people who had the sound cue performed better on creative tasks than the people who had just been in that drifting stage on its own. So we can kind of deduce that in dreaming, not only can you be just along for the ride, but you can actually aim a little bit. But here's the thing, dreaming is happening whether we remember it or not. The key here I wanted to ask is, what does remembering your dream actually provide for you? 2 things. The first is information. When researchers match people's dreams against what actually happened in their days prior, they find a very clear match, meaning a lot of our dreams are just tracing back to something that actually happened that our brains are just trying to process while we're sleeping. And more clearly, it's usually the things that carry some sort of emotional weight through them— your actual concerns, things that matter. Your dreams are basically a reflection of a list of things that your brain marked down of things that are actually important to you. So remembering them is how you get to read that. The second reason that some folks might find it important to remember their dreams is it can actually help with Reprocessing nightmares. If you get chronic bad dreams, the standard treatment for that is something called imagery reversal. You take the nightmare that you had and then you rewrite the ending while you're still awake, and then you just rehearse that. That only works on a dream that you actually remember. You can't rewrite the ending of a dream that you can't recall. And here's the crazy thing. We spend about 6 years of our life on average dreaming. 6 years. That seems like a pretty big waste to not have access to any of that information at all. So if that window could be very useful to us, Why do we tend to wake up not having any recollection of our dreams? Well, it's not that you have a dreaming problem or you're just not a dreamer. The recall problem is a timing problem. If you cue yourself to wake up during a REM cycle, then you can remember your dream about 80% of the time. But if you wake up during the wrong part of your sleep cycle, then that opportunity has gone out the window. So during REM, the brain chemistry that essentially finalizes the process of filing away your experiences into long-term memory goes quiet. So what's usually left is like this fragile trace, like an essence, and almost anything can wipe it right away, like light or moving or just another interruptive thought that you have first thing in the morning. So boiling it all down, remembering your dreams comes down to a timing issue— being able to be awake and record something down when you still have that just fragment of an essence that you can trace back. So it's not talent, it's timing. But usually timing is something you have no control over when you're waking up unless you're using alarm. But you still cannot discern typically if you're waking up in the middle of a REM cycle or deep sleep or light sleep. Again, you don't get to tell your alarm what sleep stage cycle it gets to go off during. So to fix that, you kind of have to know exactly what your brain is doing at different points in the night, which is exactly what this headband does. The newest feature I want to talk about is called Dream Recall, and it's actually a mode that is inside of your smart wake-up feature. Normally, the smart wake-up feature in Muse is going to look for the lightest part of your sleep cycle and gently eases you out of that in the morning. Dream Recall simply changes what you're cueing the headband to be looking for. So instead of looking for the lightest sleep in the morning, it's looking for your last REM cycle. But here's one thing worth knowing is you don't just necessarily flip it on. There is a little bit of like an active process to this in the beginning of things. First, you have to set up the latest time that you're willing to get woken up, and then you'll set a dream window that counts backwards from that point. Muse will suggest starting with an hour, and I have generally felt that that has been totally fine. So that is essentially the time range in which you are allowing the Muse headband to be looking for your REM cycle. So if my latest wake-up time is 6, I'm going to set my hour dream recall window to be about 5, and then Muse is cued to look for my REM sleep cycle between 5 and 6. The next thing you will want to do is you pick your sound cue. If you remember back to when I was talking about how those researchers had a sound cue that helped you kind of aim your dream a little bit. This is similar to that. You'll pick a sound cue and you'll actually rehearse it before bed. There are continuous options like continuous crickets or continuous wind chimes, and then there are more intermittent ones like a bell every so often or a ding. Continuous ones are definitely more atmospheric, so I found that they tend to blend more into the scene of your dream. And you can think of the intermittent ones as more of like nudges. Either way, the cue isn't meant to be waking you up. The idea is that the cue actually travels with you into the dream, so it becomes a marker that you start to recognize within your dream. And that's why you want to practice it the night before, get accustomed to that, stick with the one cue, you know, don't go changing your cues across the whole week, and get your body accustomed to it and what you're trying to assign meaning to it for. When this cue starts playing in the morning actually does matter a bit more than you'd think. You see, REM cycles run 30 to 60 minutes. And they get longer towards the morning. So where you set your window when this cue starts changes what you get. A cue earlier in the REM period gives you a little bit more runway, and a cue later in that REM observation period means that you've had a little bit more time to like build your dream before that cue gets involved. Muse actually recommends letting at least 10 minutes of dreaming start before the cue begins. Then Muse starts to notice if you start to surface back into lighter sleep where you might be waking up in that dream window. And it actually auto-snoozes that cue. So the sound starts to back off and kind of holds you right at the edge of that dreaming and wakefulness state. That sounds pretty fancy, right? Like a headband that can actually get you into this state where you're like lucid dreaming, able to remember your dream, know that you're in a dream and decide to stay there. It's pretty wild. So does it actually work? Can it actually back up that it's doing that accurately? REM sleep is actually one of the hardest stages of sleep to detect from the outside. Your wearable ring or typical like wrist wearable device, they're actually reading your body movement and your heart rate data and making an inference of where you are in your sleep stages based on that. So those devices are not actually reading your sleep stage, they're inferring. Muse, as I've mentioned in previous videos, has EEG technology, so it's able to actually measure your brain activity, which is the same stuff that a sleep lab would be doing. And REM happens to be the sleep stage that it reads the most accurately. So I want to talk about my personal experience of using this for the past couple weeks here because I did not expect to experience what I did. I personally chose the cue of crickets. It seemed the least creepy and the most calming to me. Wind chimes kind of creep me out a little bit, and the intermittent cues seemed a little too alarming, so crickets were great. I've stuck with that cue the entire time of testing it just to eliminate the variability. Funny thing is that, true to what Mew said might happen, the crickets actually became Part of my dreams every single time, and it still kind of freaks me out when it happens because I'm like I recognize it happening, and you're just it's just almost like mind-blowing that you're able to hover in this dream space and recognize that you're in a dream at the same time. I do want to mention I did practice that sound and rehearse it every night doing some calm breathing exercises, helping my body kind of assimilate that sound as a sound of safety and not one that was going to jar me awake. Now did I get groggy from waking up in a REM cycle instead of like a lightest part of my sleep stage cycle a little bit, but not nearly as bad as if you were to be woken up in the middle of deep sleep. So it wore off pretty quickly for me. Now, like I said earlier, again, waking up in the middle of your REM cycle can cause a little grogginess. It'll clear pretty quickly. Again, not like waking up in deep sleep where you feel like you got hit by a truck and can't recover for the first 4 hours of the day. Not like that at all. However, I have oscillated between doing, again, dream recall night and then just using the normal smart wake-up feature where it's waking me up during my lightest sleep cycle, and that's been totally fine to go between. Now, as you know, dreams are not always nice. So if you are somebody who is dealing with something particularly emotionally heavy right now, or you're enduring a lot of physical, mental stress, that sort of thing, and you have a propensity for nightmares, then this might not be something you want to use at this point in time unless you're willing to process through that stuff in the morning. So just take that with a word of caution. So if you are somebody who already has a Muse S Athena and has a Muse subscription, I highly recommend checking out this beta. So I really recommend trying it out. You'll probably be as surprised as I was about it. Um, but definitely give it a couple of nights. If one cue isn't settling well with you, try another cue, but just don't go switching them night to night. But the whole experience has been a very fun experiment, which I'm loving. So what do you guys think? Is this something that you would try? Are you excited about this type of technology? And have your dreams ever told you something important that you found useful or acted off of? I'd love to hear everything about your dreams down below in the comments, and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Happy dreaming. Bye.
