It’s the same for me and every other aphantasic I’ve spoken with. I go years and years without remembering dreams, but there are distinct periods in my life when I remembered them often. For me it’s essentially if I wake up in a dreaming state and can quickly “translate” them into language. Strange to describe, but I do have a very distinct experience of dejavu sometimes, which I’ve come to believe is tied to latent dream memories—curious if you have anything like that?

It’s actually something very interesting about the function of dreaming in the brain that this is the case. That there’s such insane variability in the structure of conscious experience and memory, but the imagistic quality of dreaming fulfills a necessary role for all. I’ve read reputable studies that suggest it’s crucial for learning, something similar to training on synthetic data.