So what I unerstand form everything i have read is that when we go to sleep our long term memory shuts down and all the memories we have from dreams are stored into our short term memory which is somewhat unstable and unreliable resulting is forgetting our dreams easily.

Now my question is, if our long term memory shuts down like i believe it does how does our brain access our old memories to create our dreams? or how do we access memories when lucid in order to complete a certain task.

maybe there i just a kinda one way road block we cant put memories in but we can take them out...

Any thoughts?