Dream Recall?

[Joker99352]

Now the term dream recall is pretty straightforward. I know what it means sort of, but what I want to know is, why is it so important? I don't remember many dreams but when I do they usually stick with my for the rest of the day or so, unless it's a lucid dream (which I just had less than a week ago), then I remember it for a while. I'm still working on being able to maintain lucidity and all that but that's besides the point. Anyway, how is this important and how can I use it to my advantage?

[Oneironaut Zero]

Now the term dream recall is pretty straightforward. I know what it means sort of, but what I want to know is, why is it so important? I don't remember many dreams but when I do they usually stick with my for the rest of the day or so, unless it's a lucid dream (which I just had less than a week ago), then I remember it for a while. I'm still working on being able to maintain lucidity and all that but that's besides the point. Anyway, how is this important and how can I use it to my advantage? [/b] Well, I suppose the most straight-up answer is "What good is being a lucid dreamer, if you only remember a small fraction of your dreams?" The main reason to work on recall is that people dream every night, many times a night. Training your mind for lucidity is kind of pointless if you're going to be the type that forgets most of his dreams after waking up. Another reason is that, to be good at the DILD technique, you'll have to become accustomed to noticing recuring dreamsigns and things that happen, in dreams, that don't happen in waking life. Keeping a dream journal and working on recall is the best way to do this, because you can start to log some of the strange occurances, recognize recuring signs and motiffs and using knowledge of them to attain lucidity, as they happen more and more.

[Scruffy]

Oneironaut hit it on the head. Learning to lucid dream without being able to remember your dreams is essentially like going skydiving, or bungee-jumping, or (insert fun sport here), and not even realizing it ever happened. Then, there's the learning aspect: if you can't remember what happened in your dreams, i.e., whether you were lucid, how good that lucidity was, and so on, then you won't know what techniques work and which don't. Its like going to school, but forgetting what you learned.

[Gwendolyn]

Yes, there is no way you will be successful in your lucid dreaming endeavors if you don't remember your dreams. How would you become aquainted with your dreaming world, if you didn't know what it was like to begin with? And if you didn't remember if you had LDed, what use would it be to you?