It may not be your fault and there may in fact be something wrong with your brain that cannot be fixed by simply keeping a dream journal. For example, I'm a chronic caffeine user. Caffeine is an acetylcholinerase inhibitor, sort of like galantamine. So it is possible that my brain is desensitized to acetylcholine (or produces much less because it counts on the caffeine to keep it from being destroyed) and so its build up during REM just doesn't have the same impact as on other people, sort of like I had been using galantamine every day for years. Maybe not, but that is a theory. Lots of other things, like the ratio of different types of fat, could be lowering the quality of your REM sleep.

I have been taking DMAE Bitartrate, plus a secondary source of choline. This does not have the sharp effects that something like nicotine, galantamine or some other supplements have. At first, I thought it wasn't having much of an effect, so I upped the dosage. A lot. I'm taking 2g of DMAE bitartrate before bed. It could be that my supplier is shit and is scamming me by selling me a smaller dosage than claimed, because I notice no negative side effects such as insomnia from it. As a consequence, I wouldn't advise anyone to start at 2g but keep the option of much higher dosages than usual in mind. The effect? I wake up 3 hours after sleep with clear memory of a dream, which if I start going through backwards, I can see it stretching quite a bit. I am actually able to write something in my dream journal beyond "there was a cat... I think...". I then wake up two hours later with clear memory of another dream, even longer. If I force myself to stay in bed, I can keep waking up from long, relatively vivid and detailed dreams for 12 hours after I went to sleep, and I keep getting more and more lucid and clear-headed in those dreams. I have better memory of dreams I didn't write down than I have of dreams that I did write down when not using DMAE.

I'm not saying to neglect the practice steps, but if you are trying to become a better runner without eating any protein, you won't get far. The brain requires all sorts of nutrients to operate properly, and while it won't necessarily die due to bad nutrition, it might be operating at a much worse level than it could.