Inconsistencies with improving dream recall

I been journaling my dreams for about 6 weeks or more. On most nights I remember 1 dream, on others 2, 3 and occasionally 4 and then there are nights in which I only remember 1-3 sentences worth of nightly dreams. There was one sleep period however that I remembered up to 7 different dreams in one night but that was a very rare event. It's discouraging because I wish I could remember 5+ dreams in one night but instead I wake up startled by my alarm remembering very little or absolutely nothing. On average I remember 1 or 2 dreams per night (about half are very short ones) but I would of expected my dream recall to improve much more than it has now especially since I'm purposely waking up 4.5 hours after going to bed and then in 90 minute intervals after. Is this low rate of dream recall normal? It's concerning me but then again I may be pushing myself too much and trying too hard.

Waking up via alarm could be causing you to lose some dreams as the sudden awakening and jolting around etc. could throw recall out the window, its happened to me a few times. Other than that recall naturally ebbs and flows a bit each day depending on your stress levels, amount o sleep etc, but you should be happy with consistently remembering at least 1 dream a night; some people *cough*me*cough* struggle even with that :).

I think when I started out being into LDing I was trying to catch every brief awakening. Now I just tell myself, "I''ll wake up between 12 midnight and 1am and then later about 4am" and usually find I can do that (no alarm) and will remember a dream on waking.

Stess has a lot to do with it for me. On weeks I have less to worry about I have good recall of 3+ dreams a night. On Stressful weeks I'm lucky to get fragments of even one dream a night even though I get roughly 7 hrs of sleep a night.

My dream recall used to drop a lot on nights that I needed to set an alarm. I'm a light sleeper and used to almost literally jump up to catch the alarm clock as soon as it went off. Of course, this would lead to almost no recall. I thought a more gentle sound would do to wake me up and I found an Android app called Gentle Alarm. It comes with gentle nature sounds and you can regulate the volume and the fade-in. Some people wouldn't wake to my alarm, but it works wonders for me, the fade-in wakes me up slowly and gently and my recall is quite good.

Other than this, dream recall is what they said, it's all about setting intention and being consistent with the dream journal.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I ditched the alarm and worked on being much less stressed through meditation and progressive relaxation. I also began setting the intention to wake up after every dream and recall them in vivid detail. My recall has improved drastically. This past week I averaged to recall 2 LONG dreams per night. Last night I managed to recall a total of 7 dreams. 2 very long ones and the rest were short (about a paragraph) to moderately long. I sincerely appreciate the advice from everyone who cared to reply :happyme:

Now the issue is finding a good sleep schedule so that I can have the time during the night to write down all of these dreams. It's certainly a good problem to have so long as motivation doesn't become an issue.

I've been DJing for about 2 weeks and what I notice is if I wake up naturally and remain still with eyes closed and keep a relaxed mental state my recall is pretty good. If the alarm wakes me up it's not so good. I've been setting an intention before I go to bed to wake after each dream and remember the details. The interesting thing is before I started DJing I'd wake up several times a night, but I usually only recalled a few dreams a week. Now I'm averaging 2.5 a night.

So I think intention plays a huge part in dream recall, and combined with not being startled out of sleep and remaining still with eyes closed results in much better dream recall.