Huge dream recall (fresh and old) jump forward for me in last 24 hours - what I changed

Thought I'd share what I did yesterday and today that seems to have dramatically boosted my recall. I'm still trying to attain lucidity on a at least semi-regular basis, and even though I'm not there yet, I know dream awareness and recall are huge steps towards that. I journal my dreams every morning that I remember them and on average I remember them about 4-5 mornings a week, but only remember 1-2 segments / dreams. I looked back and since I started journaling I have never remembered more than two from one night. This morning, I remembered 4 dreams from the night pretty vividly. This afternoon I laid in bed for a while and remembered 3 more dreams I had in the past I had before i started journaling and had long since forgotten.

So, what did I change in my routine? Yesterday I started a simple mindfulness meditation routine and only did it for 10 minutes in the middle of the day and 15 minutes in bed right before I went to sleep. Then, this afternoon during my time laying in bed I listened to a Gamma based binaural beat audio track from YouTube in headphones while I laid there. Although my goal was achieving a WILD (which I love trying but just haven't been able to pass over into sleeping / dreaming yet) I believe getting my mind in a conscious gamma state through the audio and focus on breath that I was easily able to access dream memories not otherwise accessible. I felt like if I kept laying there the dream memories would just keep coming and coming. If that's the case, it is an unintended side effect I'm pretty stoked about.

I can't be certain these practices are directly responsible for the increased recall because I haven't been doing it long enough to prove a direct correlation, but since the results were so dramatic I'd say it's a pretty good bet. Of course there is lots of information about meditation increasing recall out there, but I am astounded at how quickly I potentially have seen such positive results. Especially since I really haven't had the chance to perfect the meditation practices at all. Anyhow, thought I'd share. If you haven't already tried these practices you may want to go for it. If you have, let me know your results. I'm really hoping success with the recall indicates upcoming success with more frequent lucidity.

This is funny you brought this up as I've been doing the same things pretty much. I am not the best lucid dreamer, and have actually only had two unintentional ones so far. I use WILD as my main technique too, but very recently I've tried to get my self-awareness more keen so I took up meditation.. while listening to gamma binaural beats before bed! I started all this around a week ago so I am not sure of the final results, yet I can relate to you in that I have experienced some pretty vivid dreams.

So basically I have no idea if what you are doing will work or have results, but I have been messing around with the same near exact thing and am starting to see results, mainly more vivid dreams. Only time will tell at this point it seems.

I've been doing a combination of meditation and MILD both through the day and before bed the past few days, and I too have seen a massive increase in dream recall. Perhaps the combination of the two is helping the MILD part be more effective, or that the act of meditation itself is really beneficial, it certainly seems so to me.

Mindfulness is at its roots just learning to pay attention. I find mindfulness/paying attention during the day drastically increases my memory of the day's activities. It just makes sense that learning this habit of paying attention during the day translates into dreaming at night. I find that my dream recall and sense of "presence of awareness" in dreams has gone up quite a lot since starting waking mindfulness practice.