Do you write down every dream in detail?
After a month of taking up dream journalling, I feel the time has almost come for me to make some kind of compromise.
So far I have been writing down all the details of dreams I can remember, when I remember them, which is often in the middle of the night. I imagine that in theory this is the best way to remember the most dreams in the most detail, but as my recall is improving I'm finding that it just takes too long! At the moment I can get away with it, but when I start my new job and have a schedule again it will not work if I want to have enough sleep as well. Last night and this morning I spent about an hour and a half in total writing dreams out. Including time spent waking up and falling back to sleep it gets even longer. I'm very happy that I'm having successful recall and enjoying many dreams, but I'm finding my mind's enjoyment of writing it all down diminishing. And from past experience I know that however in control I think I am, if there isn't enjoyment in something I will eventually stop.
My motivation to recall dreams is so I can remember and learn from meaningful ones, so I can lucid dream and so I can remember lucid dreams. The idea of having a detailed catalogue of all my dreams is appealing, but in reality I probably wouldn't re-read it much except to find dream signs, as I'm always having new exciting dreams to think about.
So I'm wondering, in what ways do you 'settle for second best' when it comes to dream journalling? Do you write down every dream in detail?
I'm thinking of adopting the 'tagging' method I read here somewhere, where you wake up just to write down some key words. Would this work if I'm not writing the dreams down as soon as I wake up? I'm thinking I'll read the tags in the morning to recap the dreams in my mind, then later in the day I can review them again and write down the details of those dreams I feel are more important/interesting. This way I'll probably actually be flexing my memory muscles more due to recalling the dream 3 times, so who knows, maybe it would be an improvement!