Verre

Recall: 1/10. Another night of shitty recall. It looks like 3/26 was the last day where I would say my recall was up to par, so this has been going on for a little over a week now. I was sure it had been a lot longer before I checked my DJ... being cut off from my dreams night after night like this is unpleasant to say the least.

I've tried variations on bedtimes, alcohol, caffeine, and supplements, with no effect on dream recall either way. It's starting to look like stress might be a critical factor, though, and not the way you might think. I've heard some people say that stress kills their dream recall, but for me it seems to be just the opposite. In the past I've noticed that my dreams become intensely vivid at times when I'm under a lot of daytime stress—and some of my most amazing lucid streaks have occurred on nights when I had absolutely no time or intention to practice because I was under so much pressure WL. Conversely, during periods when I'm under very little stress and I think I'll be able to devote my full attention to dream practice, I tend to end up in a dryspell.

This pattern holds true for my dream experiences over the past month. Early in March I was under unbearable stress at work, and yet I had my best lucid streak ever, with ten distinct lucid incidents in the first half of the month. The last night I dreamed vividly was March 26, an extremely stressful night due to daytime anxieties. Since then, WL pressures have eased and I've been much more relaxed and mellow... and at the same time my dreams have become wan and elusive, despite firm waking intentions to remember them.

Last night the terrible recall was made even more obtrusive and aggravating by the inexplicable failure of my attempts to counter it. I went to bed and set a strong intention to remember my dreams, and here's the kicker: I actually do recall a point before I was actually awake, where I still remembered the dream I'd just had and was going over the details to fix them in memory... and then somehow on the transition to waking all the details dissolved anyway.