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1- Even if you donīt remember any dream, open your dream journal and write down the time you woke up and "blank". you may notice dream memories popping out of nowhere
2- Imagining you are becoming lucid during the day at random times and recalling previous moments during the day (also as part of a reality check) make my dreams more vivid and easier to recall. Might work for you too
3- Eat a banana 3 hours before your usual waking time
Great tips! On point 2, I'm trying something similar right now, which I'm calling "Wake Journaling" for lack of a better term for now. It's basically doing a session of ADA* for 10-20 minutes, doing something else to get your mind off of it, and then writing in your DJ a full account of the things you noticed/saw/felt/heard/thought; also adding the kinds of things you would have done if it had been a dream. I'm interested in your experience with doing this -- did it help raise your dream awareness/lucidity rate or just improve recall?
And obviously I'm very interested about the banana comment :D Please elaborate!
*By a session of ADA I mean raising your senses individually (sight, sound, touch, etc.), then holding them all together simultaneously, while also noting current emotion and meaning/analysis of your surroundings. I've been thinking a lot lately about what I mean when I say awareness; awareness of what? Only sensory inputs? Or should it also include context (emotional and situational), derived meaning, validation that everything in your surroundings makes sense, etc. Would love to hear your thoughts on this too!
If you can't recall something you know was a dream, keep in mind that it is possible to dream about something that can be confused with non-dream sleep. For example, one can dream about being in bed thinking about something. Try to recall any thoughts you were recently having upon waking up if you can't recall anything else. These thoughts might have been a dream.
The banana comment is referring to vitamin B6. A banana contains a decent amount of vitamin B6 (0.4 mg or ~30% daily recommended value) and vitamin B6 has been shown to increase dream recall in various studies. However, in these studies, 240-250 mg of vitamin B6 was consumed, so .5 mg of vitamin B6 from a banana may not be enough to see significant results. I'm not sure what the maximum safe dosage of over-the-counter vitamin b6 is, but I this dosage would be much more effective at increasing dream recall than a banana.