Swiss cheese memory

Since memory is essential to lucid dreaming how much recall do we actually have? We tend to forget dreams unless we work on dream recall. If you asked me to tell you all that happened yesterday, no matter how hard I tried I could not make it add up to the 17 hours during which I was awake. I only remember some of the stuff from last year, bits and pieces. The memories from 20 years ago when I was last into lucid dreaming: I definitely forgot way more than I remember, and even those memories that I have I question their accuracy. For example, I remember being a good lucid dreamer back then, and some of the things I know point that way, but I remember only a very few actual lucid dreams from then and if I have any written record of those lucid exploits it would be somewhere in my father's garage and more effort to find than it would be worth it, so I cannot prove to myself whether I was actually as good as I think I was. The number of memories, it's almost like in the movie, Bladerunner, where the artificial humans had their memories planted and they believed them to be true, but found out they were not. I remember bits and pieces, and while I say I remember what it was like to be a teen or a kid, I do not really, I just remember enough to have some sense of it, a flavor. Is my memory more Swiss cheese than yours? Do most of us have such poor memory? And if so, how much impact does that have on the lucid dreaming effort, to which memory is essential?

Edit: Or is it essential? Perhaps for lucid dream effort we only need as much memory as we have got or can retain, and perhaps I am just now too aware of the short comings in my memory and wish it were so much better than it is. I think about the potential of what could be done with much more memory than this, but maybe that is an unrealistic wishful thinking.

My memory seems to work like yours, I can't really remember anything specific without really focusing on it.

It's not really so much on having poor memory, since even if you do have that, it doesn't mean you can't work towards it. I know you already know that, but the thing is, there will be people who can have better recall to where it seems natural and not really too much of a strain to do, and those who try to accumulate all their power to recall a snippet. That and many factors affects the accuracy of our recall, and the swiss-cheese memory also reminds me of Apophenia, where we try to make meaning out of what seems to be meaningless data.

I feel that the longer we linger in not recalling our dreams as much as possible, the more likely we find ourselves misinterpreting what we experience. But things like having strong emotional attachments to the non-lucid dream and lucid dreams can often have us remembering most or all of the experiences in the dream because of how it made us feel. And then there's things like how much we hold on to this reality that can affect our recall. It depends on being able to balance ourselves of not being too clinging of this reality when we wake up, and just taking some time to go back to what we experienced in a dream. But again, time and things like having a job makes it difficult to live in a fairy tale like that. Currently, I haven't even attempted to devote myself wholly into dream recall (to give myself a break from before), but I can still remember a good amount in ones I left off weeks of trying to record. That could be that when I first found out about lucid dreaming, I decided to stop worrying about my abilities and being able to express gratitude in what I can do now, and just having discipline in myself to recalling as much as I can despite of things being trivial in the dream.

It's difficult, but it doesn't mean we should worry too much on our current state of recalling dreams and our competence in recording them. No matter what stage you're in, it's best to keep moving forward and doing what you can do instead of building up predispositions that will just make you freeze, worry, and not get anywhere at all.

I hate brain theory - but for dreaming I really think that memory work is essential.
Once your through all the "how the Brain processes data, and memories" crap - you get to the cool abstract dreams & dreaming.

Without the memory work you just write dreams off as weird crap once you wake up, and this is a pity.

Just keep it light - do what you can. I know if I do not write it down - it's gone.
But reading dreams from my own DJ from years ago triggers the images/memories back - and I can't believe I still remember or even forgot those older dreams until I read them again.

So does this mean that we should all also be keeping waking journals to help us remember waking reality memories, because in case it was not clear, it's not just dream memories but any memories that seem like swiss cheese. Is it ok to forget so much that one does not really remember who one was but only who one is? For dream work part of the technique is mindfulness to the moment in waking life, but does that suffice, and how much long term memory from waking life can one loose before it becomes detrimental to both waking life and dreams?

I don't really have an answer, but a few related thoughts. My memory is at least as poor as yours. But memory doesn't work in the way people sometimes think it does, instead it seems to work by activating thought-associations, or memory chains. You see something or think about something and that activates a sort of tree of memories and associations that sometimes strike way back into childhood. It seems like at any one time you can only have a single thought-association chain activated, but a few minutes later you can activate another one.

So while at any one time you can only have a handful of memories available, there are a lot more in there waiting to be re-activated. I'm not sure what can be done with this information though.

As for journaling waking life, I always add any relevant info to my dream journals so the timelines for my waking and dreaming life are connected (rather than needing to look up the same dates in 2 different journals for instance). Anything that's happened lately that I might want to remember later when I'm looking through my DJ trying to figure out what might have caused certain trends gets written down. Like any books or shows that seem important, either that I might have learned something from or just gotten good ideas from or whatever. Anything that can mark changes in my life, like a new manager at work, or a new policy, a new employee if it causes changes to my life. If Im sick, or have a persistent headache for a few days, or if I ate something that didn't agree with me. If the weather is amazing, or if it sucks really bad. Just anything that might in any way connect my waking and dreaming lives together and that I might want to know later when I'm looking back over my DJ.

Because after you've compiled a decent amount of entries you do want to read back over them and you'll start to spot trends and connections that you would never ordinarily notice, until you can read a bunch of dreams all one after the other. And you will find yourself wondering "When was this in relation to my waking life? Was it when we had that terrible manager that was stressing everybody out so much? Cause if so that would explain a lot, but I don't remember when that was".