No Stupid Questions

Observational bias : You remember only the bad ones, especially as they are the ones most likely to wake you, and thus cross the memory barrier to the conscious. You likely have good ones as well that you don't remember.

If it really bothers you consider keeping a dream journal for a few months which should make you able to remember more, and more of your dreams. If it turns out you really have no good dreams, the next step is to learn lucid dreaming and fix that shit. If that's too much work, you can try repeating "I will have good dreams" in your head as you go to sleep, you might be lucky.

Has anyone else had that dream where a friend is explaining some sort of obscure trumpet offshoot with a tremolo key and a ridiculously intricate tuning compensator valve, and then he's holding one except it's basically a very small trombone with a weird apparatus off to one side, and then he plays it and the overtones are so incredibly rich that a single note almost sounds like a chord?

No?

Just me?

Okay.

This is a common symptom of CPTSD, if that is relevant to your prior experiences

You must have done something bad to deserve this. Trying thinking about everything bad you’ve ever done. That’ll help.

Whenever I relive happy memories in my dreams I wake up sad because I remember what I've lost.

Same problem. After having a nightmare I wake up with a headache from the stress/anxiety.

Best solution I came up with, try to force yourself to become lucid in every dream by realizing that shitty experiences aren't real (anymore) so you must be dreaming. Once you know you're dreaming, you can consciously decide to not care anymore. Laugh in the face of your monsters/adversary, and calm down.

Sleep/central apnea diet/medication/alcohol/lack-of-weed are the four horsemen to my nightmares. The damn persistent dreams where my legs take 1000% effort to just crawl. Usually I have to walk/lunge backwards just to get anywhere. Fuckin weird and constant.

Embrace the nightmare. Learn to take joy in the thrill like a roller coaster. They'll stop at some point when you no longer view them the same, saddly. I learned to like them as a teen and then i either just stopped having them, or stopped remembering them compared to me other dreams.

Two factors in my view:

1. You don't remember the good dreams, because we humans generally focus more on the bad things. Dreams generally don't get remembered very easily, so you only remember the very impactful ones, which would thus be the bad ones. It is possible though to want to focus more on the good stuff and train yourself to do it.
2. Afaik, you do have more bad dreams if your life is filled with anxiety or danger or whatever. Your dreams in some sense are a reflection of your waking life. So if your life is very stressful, maybe try to change that, and that might also change the dreams.

You are in this dream but we do not grant you the rank of happy. Please, take a seat.

I think it has something to do with your brain playing both sides of the dream. You are coming up with how to react, but you are also at the same time coming up with what happens next. So if you dream a lion and you are like "uhoh, what if the lion tried to chase me, that would be a problem, I'd have to run away," then you're now dreaming about a lion that is chasing you and how you are running away.

I've read if we wake up knowing what we dreamt about we likely aren't getting enough sleep. Since then I've worked hard in my sleep cycle and haven't remembered more than a dream or two a year in more than a decade. That was my solution, maybe give it a go?

As far as I know- and I'm far from an expert here- dreams are really just your brain trying to make sense of your brain doing whatever the fuck it is your brain is doing why you sleep. (maybe a de-fragmentation cycle to keep everything nice and functional? bad analogy, probably.)

in any case, your brain is trying to make sense of signals and synapses firing off, in what is basically a random pattern. so it cobbles together a reality as best it can and fit things to that.

Its also trying to maintain a certain amount of continuity with where you are. So, if you're anxious while you fall a sleep, your brain is going to incorporate that anxiety.

Also, as Bigfish mentioned, the freaky/weird/anxious ones are more likely to wake you up so that you actually remember them.

In any case, I would suggest maybe changing your bedtime routine up and finding something positive/calming to focus on. crotchet works well for me. but it could be just about anything. a feel-good novel, or whatever. (I also suggest turning the screens off.)

might not change that the only things you remember are the unpleasant ones, but it might make them less frequent.

How much cheese are you eating?

It's a way of organizing, learning and preparing you for the day ahead. It would be useful if it's about life or death stuff. For me I stress too much about small stuff until that's all I see, so sometimes we need to watch some gore and car crash videos to gain perspective.

My dreams are weirdly problem solving. They give me insights on how to handle things.