Forgetting dreams?

Hello dreamers,

I have a question about forgetting lucid dreams. I only had 1 lucid dream myself but I've read everywhere that you need to write everything down to remember your dreams.

What I don't get is why would you forget a lucid dream? You are lucid and are as aware as in waking life, maybe even more as you are dreaming and want to make use of it.
Why can we forget lucid dreams so easily compared to waking life.

Something like the following: I knew that I went to school around 2 months ago and went shopping afterwards to help a friend of mine look for a gaming mouse.
I know this as it was something memorable, I didn't need to write it down as I was aware of it happening at the time and it is just build in my memory now.
Why doesn't this work for lucid dreams, why won't people remember their lucid dreams? They are aware of it so why can't we remember it as easily as waking life?

I'm not that experienced with lucid dreaming, so I am really curious about this.

I think memory might work differently while sleeping then while being awake. Like some parts of the brain are shut down during sleep or something. But i guess if you remember your dream for a while after waking up you should probably be able to remember it like quite well. Im kinda green on this so you'd better await a more qualified answer.

For the most part, I find it's not too hard to remember lucid dreams - the exception being when they're in the middle of the night (vice the morning). Then it's hit or miss - but so would anything that happened to me in waking life during that time. ;)

Also, some lucid dreams seem to be more lucid and vivid than others.

First, it is a misconception that you have as much awareness as waking life. You can have very low awareness and still realize you are dreaming. It often takes practice and skill sets to bring FULL waking awareness into a dream.

Second, while asleep you are powerfully under the influence of chemical restraints that work much in the way narcotics would. The biochemistry of the sleeping mind is not the same as waking.

Depending on various factors (how long do you sleep before trying to remember, phase of sleep, and level of waking awareness) you may either remember almost as clear as waking, or almost not recall anything.

Dream recall is a skill to work on, and it improves as you do. Plus, much of what you experience during the day is not easily remembered. Take for instant the commercials watched during a night of watching TV. You sat through them, but if asked what commercials played the night before, you probably will not remember most of them.

Actually, Sagez, LD's are pretty easy to remember.

This is because, as you guessed already, a LD is basically a waking-life consciousness event, and probably a very interesting one at that, so it will likely be stored in your memory like one. Sure, there is a chance that, as you rack up the LD's, you will one day forget them, or parts of them, because they were not exciting or interesting enough to be stored in long-term memory... but that's probably not important right now.

Keeping a dream journal -- one in which you record as much as you can remember of all your dreams, including both NLD's and LD's -- is important, but the reasons for keeping one go beyond just being sure you don't forget your LD's. A DJ is a tool for developing recall, looking for dreamsigns, tracking your progress, making dreaming a bit more important to your daily life, and of course providing a permanent record of your adventures that you will enjoy reading in years to come. Though you should record your LD's, that is not the primary purpose of a DJ.

[Edit: Looks like Sivason snuck in ahead of me with a post that seems to run counter to what I juat said. It actually does not, but, since Sivason's is more precise, listen to him]

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sagez

Hello dreamers,
What I don't get is why would you forget a lucid dream?

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Like the gentlemen above have stated, there are differing levels of awareness, and different levels of what is memory....

I had a lucid dream yesterday, and I VAGUELY remember it....i only remember getting angry with several dream characters and levitating them and throwing them around like rag-dolls....

this lucid was in the middle of the night......i dreamt again after that, which is why some of my previous dream memory was wiped out......