I have a sleeping disorder and if I wake up and remember having a dream I almost always also feel well rested.

I remember 1-3 dreams every night. All my dreams are vivid dreams, where I know they are dreams while they are happening and I even have some degree of control over the content.

Those are "lucid dreams". My experience is that lucid dreams do lead to you be tired, probably because we tends to wake up after lucid dreams, though we wake up momentarily in normal life too, we just don't remember it.

Maybe lucid dreaming overrides the benefits of sleep since the mind is actively engaged again.

It's all fascinating, and there are no real answers whatsoever.

Also, side questions:

1. Is your working memory pretty good? What about your IQ? 2. How vivid are these dreams and how logically-sequential are they? I.e. can you remember a clear chain of events from the dream?

That's the term I was looking for.

Memory is good. It used to be even better (I could recite important parts of meetings verbatim when I first joined my company 9 years ago). I think I'm still above average, but I'm not sure how to rule out bias on that.

I've never taken an actual IQ test. When I was 5 my verbal/vocabulary skills tested on the level of a normal 10 year old. I was curious about IQ in college and took 2 unofficial tests which turned out very consistent with scores of 121 and 124. I don't really see a lot of value in IQ tests, even the official ones.

The dreams vary. Some are very detailed. Some might not be, or it's just that I don't remember as much detail except in the final dream of the night (I sometimes remember up to 3 dreams per night). Usually they are logical/realistic, but sometimes include unrealistic elements (that I know during the dream are unreal). I can usually remember the chain of events in the final dream of the night very well. I can usually remember the order that I had the dreams in too. The earlier dreams I can usually remember the high level chain of events for the other dreams, but maybe not the smaller details.

Any reason for the questions?

Yea, I asked because ability to lucid dream (and remember those dreams) is closely tied to a high working memory. A good test for working memory is called "dual n-back". Basically, its a modified version of remembering a list of numbers / letters while the list is adding and dropping items, except with a spatial aspect. More info here if interested:

https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ

Thanks for replying without context. Oh, and the reason for the chain of events question is personal curiosity. I can usually remember maybe 3 coherent actions, but there is rarely a clear start and end to the dream that I can remember.

Have you had a sleep study? I used to have tons of vivid lucid dreams during sleep apnea. Now I have much less detailed dreams and they're less frequent, after fixing my sleep apnea. It's a bit sad because the dreams were fun, but I do feel way more rested these days.

No sleep study. I do snore sometimes, but there are times, like on vacation, when I do sleep well. Maybe I'll look onto that. Thanks!