Thread: Why am i losing recall?

Alarms can be positive or negative. The deal about them is using them properly. I find out that setting alarms in the middle of the night makes me recall more dreams, but less details about them. But this proves nothing. It's merely a sign that I'm using the alarm correctly, but my recall at the moment is not as good as it used to be.

Dream recall is influenced by several factors. One of them is your memory state, since your memory can increase/decrease over-time. Just like a muscle, if you don't work on memory (and I'm not just saying dream memory) you'll eventually notice a decrease in activities that require memory.
Other factors are, but are not limited to, stress/environment/health. Stress is not always present in our conscious mind, but I notice that even if I dream as many hours as I usually do, with the difference of having an important appointment in the morning, is enough to decrease my recall. The simple act of thinking on those stressful events before I lay to sleep is enough to decrease it. About environment and health, is very complex to determine if X food is helping or harming your recall, so you might want to keep an eye to it. For example if I eat just before I go to bed, my sleep cycles get completely messed.

Now a bit more focus on the alarm you seem to think it's the root of your problem. Alarms are useful tools, since not every one is capable of waking up during the night at will. The deal is that they should follow some simple rules in order to prevent any disturb on your sleep, such as:

- The alarm sound preferably should be in a low pinch, without bass (like drums or strong/loud noises). If you're afraid to not wake up do like me. I put my normal alarm at 6am and another alarm with a loud ringtone at 6:05. This way, I wake up without much hassle and if I do happen to miss that alarm (I tweak it until it's low enough but loud enough so I can hear it) I have my backup alarm.
- Regular sleeping schedules go perfectly with alarms. This is because if you happen to find a time (let's say 4:30am) where you wake up exactly in the middle of a REM stage, then using your alarm while going to bed every day at the same time will give you a great recall in almost 100% of the nights. The trick here is experimentation!
- If you can, get an alarm that doesn't require you to move to turn it off, or that it has a really low sound. This is because it's essential that you move as little as possible when you wake up. If you do, most likely you'll loose a big percentage of the dream. Naturally, if you have a super annoying alarm, your first reaction when you wake up is turning it off: worst mistake you can ever do. Normally, I let it ring while not moving with my eyes closed. I keep a certain amount of focus on the recall to prevent falling asleep again and I wait some minutes. Sometimes it takes me up to 5minutes to pull a very long dream (or several), so don't believe in sources that tell you that if you can't remember anything for the first minute you're done.

Good luck

What he said.
I too am going through a bit of a dryspell lately. Gone down from 8/10 dreams to 1/10 dreams and sometimes none at all. It's frustrating when it seems to just come out of nowhere and even going to bed early and getting good sleep doesn't help.

My advice is to be positive. I always think that if a dryspell gets so bad I can no longer just go "it'll fix itself soon, it'll only last a day or two", and I pay attention to my recall and thus, I recall more. It's hard to keep that up all the time, so it's handy to do that when you need it.

Having dryspells isn't a signal that you are doing something wrong- it's just something that happens, like trying to ride a bike. You might fall off sometimes, but that's not always because you did something wrong.

Factors in your life do affect recall for sure. Messing about with REM cycles and setting crazy alarms all over the place don't help, but if set right they can really help you.... so yeah.

I second the stress reason too. Even if you don't feel stressed, just being in a situation where you need to perform or the states are high can affect recall. I'm in the middle of some exams right now- not too stressed, they are only practice tests, but they are still tests none the less.

Good luck getting the recall back- my advice is pay attention to what you want to have. You want to have dreams tonight.

Try going to bed at the same time every night, spend about 10 minutes in the morning trying to remember your dreams. Write down your dreams or anything you remember, keep at that for a week and your recall will improve

thanks for the help... i guess that is helpful... since i both move to turn off my alarm in the morning and also my alarm starts with a drum solo... lol .

it's also good to know that other people have the same problem... means i'm not doing anything wrong

Well I used my technique thing and I had a few dreams last night, I think I'm on my way back to normal recall. Hope the same is going for you.

yep same here... thanks heaps went from only remembering one detail to an entire dream+