So there’s some patterns to dream-recall broadly but for the most part people remember some dreams and not others and we can’t see a whole lot of rhyme or reason to that.

Beck: How much of that forgetting is because our sleep is so regimented by the outside world and we use alarms to wake ourselves up?

Bulkeley: The transition from sleeping to waking is a perilous process, the mind and the brain are really shifting in a lot of ways and a remembered dream is a survivor of that process. To just kind of slam someone out of sleep into wakefulness, that makes it hard to retain whatever remnants there may have been from a dream. There are also cases where an alarm clock might wake you up in the middle of a dream that you might have otherwise slept on through and never remembered, so sometimes alarm clocks can kind of catch a dream that you otherwise might have missed. But the overall kind of chronic effect has to be seen as diminishing the frequency and likelihood of dream recall.

I mean, we all live in the world, we’ve got places to go and things to do. So I think practically speaking if you don’t have to use an alarm clock don’t, there are times when you have to, but to give oneself a break from that can give a little more space for the dreams to return.

Beck: What distinguishes big dreams from the typical boring ones?

Bulkeley: We kind of set the premise for it with how most dreams on average tend to be pretty mundane, having to do with day to day activities and we don’t even remember them. So that’s the baseline. But then there’s some dreams that strike people as being really different, and what that means in the first instance is they can’t forget them. It’s just kind of blazed in your memory.

That usually is kind of a product of a couple of things: A physiological response, and often big dreams have really intense visual imagery and sensation. There’s kind of a hyperrealism that people will feel. And that right there opens the way to the philosophical aspect of big dreams, which is the way they challenge our epistemological sense of the world. Like, how do we know what’s real? How do we know what’s waking and dreaming? Big dreams are ruptures between dreaming and waking, and kind of merge both. These kinds of dreams have been reported by cultures all over the world throughout history. They happen to people in all place and times as far as we can tell. And that leads to the question: What’s getting activated and intensified in the normal dreaming process to generate these really extraordinary dream vision experiences?

Beck: How often do people have these? Are there times in life when they might be more likely to have them? Are certain people more likely to have them?

Bulkeley: They’re very rare, is the quickest answer. For some people it’s a dream they remember from childhood. Carl Jung, the psychologist who coined the term “big dreams,” was asking his psychiatric patients about their earliest childhood dreams, which for the most part were really big intense dreams, and he found those to be super valuable in a clinical context, they helped him make sense of the deepest conflicts and issues in the patient’s life. So childhood seems to be a fertile time for big dreaming.