Need a good reason to keep a Dream Journal? Look no further... [For the DILD user]

[alexr]

Ever wonder why you rarely get any DILD's at night? Ever wonder why despite trying so hard to RC/raise awareness throughout the day, you always end up right where you started? Still no lucids... Ever wonder WHY? Cause you're not keeping a Dream Journal is why! As I was pondering over the real reason why the time of my life where I had the most frequent lucid dreams was when I was writing an average of about a page to a page and a half in detail on my dreams every morning, I realized exactly why that was... It wasn't the remembering that caused it.... It because telling yourself to remember something is programming your subconscious to actively record and store said subject in memory in much more detail than usual at the time it would occur and that in itself, is an awareness trigger! If you ever bothered to remember your dreams before you ever knew about lucid dreaming, you would notice that when you compare before and after you started recording and writing about your dreams there was a definite increase in vividness -- it isnt the remembering itself that got better, it's the DREAM becoming more vivid as you consciously and subconsciously placed more importance on dreaming and being alert while experiencing the dream! To guarantee yourself eventually having lucid dreams, all you have to do is take about five minutes every morning and write out as much as you can remember and you will quickly see how in just a few short weeks, not only will you start having lucid dreams, you will also have dreams that are longer, vivid and most importantly, awesome! Happy dreaming! What do you guys think of the tutorial?

[TheModernNinja]

......what if you don't have those 5 min?

[alexr]

......what if you don't have those 5 min? Wake up ten minutes earlier than usual

[Firebat11]

I get annoyed because my dream journal is just a chaotic mess. I have days where I wake up and within a split second all the dreams I remembered disappear; subsequently the next day I will remember as much as 7 dreams with amazing detail. I want consistency! >=( Do you have any advice how to stop this/ improve my recall to a stable level (Ie. remembering an average of 1-2 dreams a night)?

[Whiskee]

Multiple vibration alarms on your cell phone during the last hours of the night.

[Raspberry]

Yeah I totally agree. I always get lucid when I keep a dream journal. But I'm lazy. MUST. WRITE DOWN. MY DREAMS.

[alexr]

I get annoyed because my dream journal is just a chaotic mess. I have days where I wake up and within a split second all the dreams I remembered disappear; subsequently the next day I will remember as much as 7 dreams with amazing detail. I want consistency! >=( Do you have any advice how to stop this/ improve my recall to a stable level (Ie. remembering an average of 1-2 dreams a night)? The same thing happens to everyone I would think. If your alarm is too loud and disturbing or if you wake up and start moving a lot you can forget your dreams very fast. Try to move as little as possible before you write in your DJ

[TeaSea]

I get annoyed because my dream journal is just a chaotic mess. I have days where I wake up and within a split second all the dreams I remembered disappear; subsequently the next day I will remember as much as 7 dreams with amazing detail. I want consistency! >=( Do you have any advice how to stop this/ improve my recall to a stable level (Ie. remembering an average of 1-2 dreams a night)? My best recall always happens when I'm consistent with sleep hours. If I go to bed and wake up at the same time consistently then I end up with much better sleep quality and much better recall

[Raspberry]

Oh god the tea got me again. Shat my pants. Figuratively.

[Whiskee]

If you find writing an actual dream journal boring, try Liquid Dream: Liquid Dream It's freeware, dream-sign statistics are the one feature that makes it interesting to me

[JussiKala]

Quick question: Do you recommend making an entry to my DJ whenever I don't remember any dreams? My recall is extremely random and I don't mark down nights when I don't remember anything. Would it help to mark down those nights?

[Marm]

Too much effort keeping a dream journal. I stopped mine around 4 weeks ago and started memorising all my dreams. Good memory exercise.

[alexr]

Quick question: Do you recommend making an entry to my DJ whenever I don't remember any dreams? My recall is extremely random and I don't mark down nights when I don't remember anything. Would it help to mark down those nights? Yes it does. Something like "I couldn't remember much today" helps too. I find that if I keep trying to focus on remembering, later in the day information sometimes just springs into my mind and it's like "oh yeah that's what I dreamt about!"

[Matt123]

DJ is definetely important, I use a tape recorder.

[JussiKala]

Yes it does. Something like "I couldn't remember much today" helps too. I find that if I keep trying to focus on remembering, later in the day information sometimes just springs into my mind and it's like "oh yeah that's what I dreamt about!" Yeah. I might do that. I've kept my DJ till now in windows notepad. Just did like " night #1 Insert dream ehre Night #2 " etc Since my PC is in the room I sleep in, that does fine. I sometimes have this strong feeling that I know what I just dreamed, have a very strong memory of the dream, but cannot access that at all. Like I only can access the feeling inside that dream, nothing else. And sometimes it's difficult to put into words. But I'll try.

[TheModernNinja]

Ok, you presuaded me. I really can't be bothered, but I'll start to write a entry every morning.

[alexr]

glad I could be of service

[Linnypig]

I noticed too. I haven't been keeping a DJ for about 4 weeks becuase I got lazy, but I started writing again last week because I wasn't getting lucid at all anymore and I had a lucid dream a couple of nights ago.

[zhineTech]

just a few keywords and a title are often enough to jog your memory later in the day. i often find that even if i keep a dream in my mind in the morning by lunchtime i cant recall a single bit of it. and most people certainly cannot recall most of their dreams from over a month or so ago without having them written down. maybe the occasional one will stand out, but the rest will be lost for good.

[Linnypig]

If I wake up during the night I only ever write down a title. XD Once I wake up later I can remember it pretty clearly just from the title. Even now, I just wrote up my dreams from over the last 4 days only from the titles I wrote down back then. XD But definitely, if I didn't write that when I had them, they'd be gone for sure.

[Wolf2]

Yeah, you don't need to write down the whole dream, at least not then and there. If I wake up during the middle of the night, I'll reach over and write down maybe 1 or 2 keywords from my dream and just write it out either the next day or at the end of the week in detail. Although doing it like this (in the dark) you'll soon have a messy DJ with keywords going across the page etc. Though I normally just aim for the edge of the paper and write small. The worse thing to do is wake up in the middle of the night from a dream and think "I can't be bothered writing it down, I KNOW I won't forget it" and then you wake up in the morning and can't remember a damn thing. Sometimes all it takes is 1 keyword.

[Matte87]

You need goals. That's why most people don't write in their DJ. To just get lucid isn't enough, it's what we can do once we are that's amazing.