Quote Originally Posted by Sageous View Post
...

Finally, my dream recall has always been pretty good. That might be because, rather than attempting to retain images, I tend to remember the dream as a story, and not as a series of images.... this could be because my waking-life trade is writing, I suppose. So, again, intellectual visualization seems to work for recall as well.
This is thought provoking, and my current thought is this: words and sentences are properties of the physical universe; they were designed to categorize experiences, and when applied to experiences from dream universes they help "bring the dream into the physical universe", so to speak. If no words are applied to whatever is experienced, the experience may not make it into waking awareness, and thus no dream recall. At times I dream in a kind of silent awareness of whatever is going on, during which time I never mentally verbalize or categorize anything (personally, I consider this astral projections, but YMMV). These trips can go on for a long time, with lots happening, but generally I have relatively little recall of the kinds of things that took place. I have only a meager story to tell myself afterwards, and I generally don't even have names for many of the things witnessed.