10 mysterious things that happen to your body while you sleep – #6 is the reason why you always forget your dreams.

Mysterious things that happen to your body while
you sleep: John Steinbeck once noted that “it is a
common experience that a problem difficult at night
is resolved in the morning after the committee of
sleep has worked on it.” When my head hits the
pillow and I can’t seem to turn off my thoughts, I
like to picture the committee gathering in a miniature
boardroom in my brain. I imagine tiny committee
members heatedly arguing over my dilemmas while I
snooze. What a relief to leave the toughest calls up
to somebody else.
Whether you’ve imagined it or not, you’ve
probably benefited from such a committee’s
hard work. While we doze, our brains and
bodies aren’t slacking off, they’re at work,
repairing us after the day’s battles and
refueling us for tomorrow’s slog—in more
ways than you likely realize.
There’s probably no teeny boardroom. But
here’s what’s actually going on while you’re
conked out:

1. You aren’t sleeping deeply
   most of the time.
   Not all sleep was created equal: When you
   first drift off, you get only very light sleep,
   then progress deeper and deeper into
   dreamland. The sleep cycle starts in what’s
   called non–rapid eye movement or NREM
   stage 1 (the kind of sleep you might nab if
   you were the type to doze off during your
   college lectures; you know who you are).
   Then you move into a deeper NREM 2 and
   then to the deepest, NREM 3, also called
   slow-wave sleep. Finally, you land in rapid
   eye movement, or REM, sleep, the wild part
   of the ride when most of our dreams occur.
   The whole shebang usually takes
   somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes, so
   on a typical night you’ll cycle through four
   or five times, waking up for just a sec
   As the night goes on, you spend less time in
   that deliciously deep stage 3 and more time
   in REM sleep, which explains why your
   alarm so often wakes you up in the middle
   of a totally bizarre dream, says Sigrid C.
   Veasey, MD, a neuroscientist and a
   professor of medicine at the University of
   Pennsylvania’s Center for Sleep and
   Circadian Neurobiology. But we don’t really
   know why REM periods get longer in the wee
   hours, says Daniel A. Barone, MD, an
   assistant professor of neurology at the Weill
   Cornell Medical College’s Center for Sleep
   Medicine. One theory, he says, is that REM
   sleep may somehow prepare you to get your
   butt out of bed.
2. Your brain cleans house.
   Our brains are “on” throughout the night,
   especially in that dream-heavy REM sleep,
   Barone says, when they’re actually almost
   as active as they are when we’re wide
   awake.
   Among other things, they may be taking out
   the trash. That’s one of the more exciting
   new ideas about the purpose of sleep: A
   2013 study in mice found that waste
   removal systems in the brain are more
   active during sleep. Perhaps, the
   researchers theorized, we sleep to allow
   time to clear away toxic byproducts that
   would otherwise pile up and cause
   problems, like the trademark plaques of
   Alzheimer’s disease, Veasey says.
   Your brain’s also busy cementing new
   memories while you sleep. “We think the
   brain is processing the information we
   gained throughout the day and filtering out
   the information we don’t need, which may
   be one of the reasons we dream,” Barone
   says. The theory goes that maybe
   connections between brain cells are
   strengthened or weakened during sleep,
   depending on how much we used them
   during the day, he says. The important stuff
   gets reinforced while the factoids we just
   don’t need get trashed.

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