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Whether you’re in the middle of a deep slumber or tossing and turning in the early hours of the morning, a vivid dream can be a highlight of your sleep routine that you never expected. But as wild as dreams can be—fantastic adventures, terrifying nightmares, or really strange mysteries—they’re notoriously hard to remember when you wake up. If you’ve ever wondered why you can remember dreams that feel unremarkable and not others, you’re not alone.

“We remember dreams when we wake up during a dream for long enough to think about it for at least a few seconds,” explains Jade Wu, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. “Often, we dream, wake up very briefly, and that dream is gone forever because we never encode the memory of it into long-term memory.”

Believe it or not, many of your dreams occur in the early hours of the morning, adds Wu, as dreams almost always occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep periods. Many often drift in and out of REM sleep periods, a type of sleep where eyes dart around without sending any information to the brain all while your heart rate and breathing quickens. These periods of sleep get longer and occur more frequently after we have fallen asleep and remained asleep for an extended period of time.

Usually, those who are dreaming in the middle of the night “are likely just waking up after an earlier bout of REM and remembering their dream,” says Wu. And most times, the dream is nearly instantly forgotten. Why? “We don’t encode dreams into memory the same way we do real experiences. There are fewer sensory details and contextual clues,” she explains. “We also have less time to transfer those memories of dreams into long-term memory, usually [with] just a few seconds or less, since that’s usually how long we’re awake in between REM and other sleep stages.”

Why can I never remember my dreams?

As we’ve learned, REM sleep (lots of eye movement and heart-pumping breathing!) often leads to vivid dreams—in fact, nearly 80% of all dreams take place during this memory-boosting period of sleep, says Rebecca Robbins, Ph.D., an instructor at Harvard Medical School and researcher at nearby Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

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