Poor dream memory & lucid dreams

Hey!

Does dream memory apply to lucid dreams exactly the same as to non-lucid dreams? Is it possible to expirence a LD and completely forget it as you wake up, together with all other dreams?

Five minutes ago something made me recall previous night's dream. I was running around, manipulating things as if it were a lucid dream; nevertheless I don't remember it clearly, and I recalled it just because I accidently touched a thought associated with it (if I ever remember any of my dreams, that's how).

Could it be that I was simply dreaming about a lucid dream, or indeed it was a lucid dream which I do not remember due to my poor memory?

Yup, you need good dream recall because you can forget a lucid dream just as easily as a regular dream! Case in point, I know I had one last night but this morning I couldn't remember, likely it was short but still! Gotta work on my dream recall...

It's possible to forget about a lucid dream experience, just as it's possible to forget a waking-life experience. But in my experience, completely forgetting a true lucid dream is not as likely. It seems to stick in memory more like an actual waking-life experience (even if a rather distant-feeling one), whereas nonlucid dreams tend to be much more vague and vanish more easily.

If you think you had a lucid dream but can't remember it, it is possible that this has happened, but unless the LD was not all that significant or interesting to you, this is probably not as likely as simply trying to remember an ordinary nonlucid dream about lucid dreaming. On occasion I wake up thinking I had a LD I could not recall. In some of these cases I finally managed to remember what actually happened, and often it was just a false memory of a LD that didn't actually occur, or even just some nonlucid thoughts about LDing, or something like that. I feel that in the vast majority of cases, if I have a real lucid dream I'll be able to remember at least something about it, even if it takes me a while.

So I agree that lucid dreams are possible to forget, but I don't quite agree that they're always as easy to forget as nonlucid dreams.

True, I guess I should say rather that it may also depend on the level of lucidity. I often have dreams these days where I realize I'm dreaming, so technically that's a lucid dream, but with low lucidity, so it's mostly still my 'dream brain' and it slips back into a regular dream. If it was one of the "Wow, I'm dreaming" high-lucidity versions where you get excited and fully "wake up" in your dream, I agree, your most likely not going to forget those.

I have to work on always stopping when I realize I'm dreaming like this, and use the various techniques like examining your hands, studying an object, etc, to increase my lucidity in these low-lucidity versions.

Yeah, it does sometimes feel like higher-level LDs are easier to remember than lower-level ones. Maybe that's true. It's kind of hard for me to tell. I've noticed some subtle differences in how my dream recall works for LDs vs. non-LDs, though, and have been trying to determine whether this holds for all LDs, even very weak semilucid ones. Right now, I'm leaning toward thinking that even if my recall is a bit fuzzy, my lower-level LDs usually are still easier to recall overall than a typical nonlucid dream, especially my thoughts and decisions. Those are the clearest things I usually recall upon waking up from LDs, whereas for NLDs I often don't fully understand or recall exactly what was going through my mind during the dream. There are occasional exceptions to this, but it seems to be true most of the time for me. Of course, it could well be different for each person, too.

Another complication is that different parts of the same dream can be more or less difficult to remember, especially if you gain or lose lucidity. Often when I become lucid in the middle of a dream I'll find everything before lucidity, or even leading right up to the moment where I become lucid, is hard to remember, but everything after I gained lucidity is pretty easy to recall.