Finding it harder to dream journal because of Full-Time job.

[MatthewOlson]

I've only begun the venture of increasing my dream recall once again. I started recording my dreams in a journal about a week or two ago, and slowly my dreams have been growing more and more lucid. ... =) ... It has been forever since I've been able to lucidly dream, and I want to set a firm goal to continue recalling dreams. However, I've recently started a full-time job,... meaning it requires that I get up at 7am or 7:30am, and make enough time for me to get to my place of work at 8:30am. ... This has horribly affected my ability to record things upon waking, knowing that I have to get to work (I like to take time on the details when writing). ... Its an adjustment I wasn't initially ready for, and already my streak of lucidity is gone! ... My dream recall is back to where I started, because of the lack of time I have to record my dreams and meditate (let them settle to memory). I'm sure there are plenty of you who have met this predicament at least once. Is this simply due to an adjustment in lifestyle, or is my dream recall going to consistently suffer because of my schedule? Any suggestions on increasing dream recall?

[J.D.]

This happened to me just over a year ago. I was on the mother of all hot streaks with my lucid dreams, then work took over. I tried to get around it by taking five minutes in the morning just to jot down some notes about any dreams I had, nothing too detailed, but enough to jog my memory when I went to write it up later. That's what I recommend. You'd be surprised how much you'll be able to re-remember, even after work, with a few prompts from when you woke up. Aside from that, make time for sleeping in on your days off. You'll probably find yourself waking up at the normal time out of habit, but think of it as an excuse for a WBTB. Good luck.

[AL3ZAY]

If you have the money, you can purchase the software called Dragon: Naturally Speaking, and you can use that and a wireless microphone to recite everything you were going to write into your dream journal, and your computer's word processing program will take it all down for you while you get ready through the Dragon software. Or you can buy a small handheld recorder, and recite the content you were going to put into your dream journal into it, and then make a written copy later, or just archive your recordings. It's less about the medium you use to store your dreams, and more about just storing them in some way to bring their level of importance up in your mind. Written or audible will have the same results, and combining the two will have better results. You remember certain percentages of what you see, hear, say and do individually, but you remember a higher percentage of the combination of all 4 if done on the same subject or task.

[yuppie11975]

Dude, I have the exact same problem! Well, I used to. I wake up at 7 every morning to go to school,, so I'm in the exact same situation as you. So you don't forget, just jot down some details, and expand upon it when you have time. No sweat

[Finlander]

I wake up at 7 everyday, except weekends. As Yuppie said I only write little notes to my DJ, then expand them when I have time.