Thread: Best alternative to a Dream Journal? Help.

Typically what I do, I turn my phone's back light down, so if I wake up in the middle of the night I don't blind myself. Then if I do wake up, I write it down on like notes for the iphone or something where you can leave yourself a reminder or anything of the sort. I then go back to bed and in the morning, if I don't have anything important to do, I write it down in Libre Office on my computer. This has worked best for me so far. Hope this helps!

I recommend just recording key words on a pad. If you can reach the pad you can scratch down a few words, even in the dark. As soon as you wake up, try to add a few more words. Around mid morning look at what you wrote and try to rember anything you can.

Get yourself one of these. Won't wake anybody up, won't provide a shock to the retinas that will wake you up the way a monitor or room light will. You might want to replace the ink cartridge though, the one they come with makes a pretty thin and scratchy line that's hard to read. I like to replace it with a good gel pen cartridge so it makes a nice thick bold line that's easy to see.

I remember an old ad for LaBerge's Lucidity Institute back in the 80's or early 90's in the back of some magazine where they sold these as lucidity aids. I swear by mine.

EDIT**

Or maybe this.

Originally Posted by rynkrt3

Hey everyone, quick question. It is impossible for me to keep a dream journal, in the middle of the night I can not turn on a lamp because it will wake my girlfriend up. Same thing with me trying to get my phone to record a dream. Are there other ways to increase recall without keeping a consistent DJ?

Hello rynkrt3. I am in the same boat for different reasons. I struggle with my sleep. If I wake up after a dream and try to write, or record information there is about a 60%+ chance I won't be able to fall back to sleep and will be awake for the rest of the night, and exhausted for the entire day. Here is what I do: When I wake up after a dream I just lay still with my eyes closed and spend 30 seconds to a few minutes trying to recall as much as possible. Then I focus on a couple of key words to remind me of the dream. I repeat those words a few times in my head and then doze back off. In the morning I try to recall the key words, which help me to recall the dream. It takes practice, but it is working fairly well for me. I often can't remember large amounts of detail from early dreams, but I do remember some. But I remember much more of the later dreams.

Example: My second dream last night the key words were "whirligig" and "storm". This helped me to recall a significant amount of that dream.

Although I do keep a dream journal (on Android), I do find that my dream recall is quite good even though I don't write down my dreams 'til the morning. I use a technique a bit like Tygar's, in that I tend to wake after each dream, then just stay very still and re-run as much of the dream as I can in my head. It takes practice, but I found it just improves as you do it. Sometimes it is difficult to remember the first dream in the morning, or another thing that can happen is I forget the last dream as I am transcribing the first! Maybe it doesn't matter too much, since immediately on waking from a dream I do have good recall of that dream.
The other thing I do is if I wake from a second dream, I recall that one first, then think back to the first so as to refresh the memory of that one.
I tend not to have more than 4 dreams a night that I have to remember. I do wonder though if may times I am only recalling the last part of a dream in real detail. Some long dreams are really vivid just as I wake, but then the recall of the early part can seem hazy very quickly.

For the LDs I have had, although short, they are SO much more memorable than the non-lucids. What I haven't quite got my head around yet is whether remembering your dreams is only about being able to remember your LDs, or if it is somehow instrumental in achieving lucidity. I think everyone assumes that it is, but that doesn't necessarily make it so?

Keep a scratchpad where you write down key elements from the dream in darkness.
Of course, writing without seeing anything can be hard at first, but you will eventually get a feel for where on the pages you have already written other words.
Once you have written down the most important keywords, write down the dream for real later during the day in your real dream journal.

How about a voice recorder that you can whisper into? Or have a computer turned on, with a text editor open, but the monitor unplugged so you can just type into it whatever you remember?

I just write on a pad in the complete darkness. A few times I wrote completely over a previous entry, but I could still read it with effort. Also, the mere act of re-living the dreams in my mind is enough for me to keep them memorable for several more hours after waking, but I have to refresh it periodically to prevent them from totally slipping. It is less reliable than writing them down, but many times better than doing nothing.

One morning, I woke up, and remembered a vague feeling of a dream, not anything worth writing down, but I thought I would write it down anyway, just to strengthen the habit of remembering. As I started to write it down, I remembered another dream, and then another one, then two more. Then to my surprise, I remembered a lucid dream. I had no idea at all I had a lucid dream until I was recalling a different dream that night. I assumed I would definitely remember lucid dreams, but this proved to me that they too can be forgotten.

Dream journaling changed my vague feeling of a partial fragment into 5 good sized dreams, one of which was lucid. If your pen has a cap, you can clip it to the page where you left off last, and then use your non-writing hand to keep track of each line you add, then re-clip the pen and doze back to sleep for more dream fun!