I think I am missing some awesome things..

[mimihigurashi]

This morning, very shortly before waking up, I remember realizing that I'm about to wake up. Along with that, the feeling, or rather realization, that I'm about to forget almost every single thing that happened during this night, and there was so much that happened, it was like a full 10 hours day of adventure, like waking-life length of time. That realization was very brief, then I fell asleep and woke up a few more times and in the end all I could remember was the realization, one dream, and a few nonsensical fragments.. My recall is not usually this bad, it was awful today because I fell asleep listening to music, but that's not the point. I've had similar experiences many times before, where I would wake up with the feeling that I've been away for a long time and I've done many things and a lot has happened there. Did anyone else experience something like this? And am I the only one getting the feeling that we might be missing a lot of incredible things during the night due to incomplete recall? I mean it's good to remember 3-4 dreams per night, I just get the feeling that there's so much more out there.. Perhaps not every single night, but in some nights I definitely feel like I woke up from even a few days-long journey/adventure. Sorry if this is too vague or nonsensical, just can't get it out of my head, felt like needing someone else's input..

[JustASimpleGuy]

Funny you should post this today because that's exactly what happened to me last night! I even remember waking up at one point remembering a truly epic dream and several shorter dreams, but for some reason I didn't journal (maybe it was a FA?). When I woke up for the final time it was after another epic dream I had recall of. But I had the feeling there was sooo much more and I remember remembering it all during that one waking which was probably a FA... Anyway, it was kind of a typical decent night for recall with 4 dreams recalled and one being an epic, however at that one point I had the feeling it was a truly epic night but I just can't recall the rest of it. By the way, and I don't know if this played a part in it, but I got a REM-Dreamer Pro this week. The first couple of nights I used preset values for visual cues, and the low intensity setting didn't manifest in my dreams and the medium setting woke me up several times. Last night a used some custom settings for flash brightness (low) and length of cue series (long) and three times the cues seeped into the epic I remember. I even connected it with the REM-Dreamer, though not by name, and it presented itself as sunglasses with an intense flashing neon blue light. I understood it was practice for gaining lucidity, just didn't put 2 + 2 together to come up with 4...

[Sageous]

Here's a hopefully helpful tip, Mimi: When this happens to me (and I think it happens occasionally to lots of dedicated dreamers who care where their mind went all night, BTW), I try to quickly do a DEILD and return to as quiet and plain a dream as I can conjure (i.e., an empty room, or maybe underwater) and then sit/float quietly, carefully remembering the night's dreams as far back as I can go. You'd think this wouldn't work because, in theory, your dreams from early in the night should already be gone, especially if they were NLD's and your more recent dreams were more interesing, but I've found that scanning for recent dreams during a dream seems to work quite well, and generally far better than trying to remember from a waking-life perspective. It probably has something to do with waking-life mental machinery still being turned off, or maybe because access to these gossamer memories is simply done more easily during a lucid dream; I don't know. However, it has worked for me, many times, so it might not hurt to give it a shot. You can even do it if you have to get up for work or school, too, because it only takes a couple of minutes to either gather memories of your night's dreams or realize they just aren't there (or never were; sometimes I wonder about that feeling you describe, whether it represents actual awesome dreams or just the impression of them, but I guess that's for another thread). I hope this helps, or at least gives you an interesting new thing to do, and that you can be assured that you are not alone in this feeling...

[JustASimpleGuy]

When this happens to me (and I think it happens occasionally to lots of dedicated dreamers who care where their mind went all night, BTW), I try to quickly do a DEILD and return to as quiet and plain a dream as I can conjure (i.e., an empty room, or maybe underwater) and then sit/float quietly, carefully remembering the night's dreams as far back as I can go. You'd think this wouldn't work because, in theory, your dreams from early in the night should already be gone, especially if they were NLD's and your more recent dreams were more interesing, but I've found that scanning for recent dreams during a dream seems to work quite well, and generally far better than trying to remember from a waking-life perspective. Makes sense to me and I'll keep it in my hip pocket for when I am more proficient at this. When I do recall multiple dreams in one waking it's usually when I do a good job of catching the waking immediately and not opening my eyes and not moving whatsoever. It's that semi-dreamy state between sleep and being awake and if I work it properly I can pull in more dreams than the one at the forefront of memory. However if I open my eyes and/or turn over before I catch myself and remember I shouldn't, I tend to only catch the most recent dream that's already present in memory, if that. Sometimes I even know it's there but it melts away so fast.

[FryingMan]

Sageous, interesting notion of re-entering a dream in order to recall, I'll have to try that sometime. mimi: yes, I get this all the time. I very frequently get the notion that I've been away on adventures *all night long* and only am able to recall the latest or the most memorable of the moments. On those nights where I actually do arouse on the inter-sleep-cycle wakings enough to recall and find the will to record, I can wrack up an amazing number of dreams/scenes in a single night, 16+ in some cases (usually around 4 dreams per waking, and 4 wakings). When I do mental journaling (which I do more and more in order to minimize sleep disturbances), where I try to maintain a growing list of all the dreams of the night until morning (and refresh the list on each waking), sometimes I'll forget the actual dreams from the earlier cycles but remember how many there were. And, I remember that did experience them, I just don't recall the actual experience. I find mental journaling is a great way to build recall, and the more I do it the more successful I am more often at remembering even the earliest dreams. Yes it risks losing the earlier ones, but I find that I prefer to miss a few early ones if it means my night is more restful, and in any case the middle/late dreams are usually still nicely detailed.

[mimihigurashi]

Thanks for the great replies everyone, good to know it's a more common thing, I find it really fascinating. I'll also have to try Sageous' trick for recalling dreams while inside a dream, never did that before, sounds interesting.