how come i usually can only remember dreams after naps or after going back to sleep?

Hey all, so as some of you know I quit smoking weed exactly one week ago so that I could get better at lucid dreaming. I've had around four to five dream recalls since the day I quit, which I think isn't very good. I think the reason is because the only thing I'm doing to try to remember is telling myself a couple times as I'm falling asleep that I'll remember the dream, and in the morning I wake up, hop out of my bed to turn off the alarm clock, and when my mind turns back to dreaming the memory has totally been erased.

But.... aside from two dreams I had that I recalled normally after waking up from a standard sleep, I seem to remember better in certain situations. The first situation is when I go back to sleep in the morning after waking up. After I wake up a second time, I always have a really vivid memory of the dream. Also, when I take naps during the day, I almost always tend to dream for some reason. Just earlier today I took a nap for just a half an hour and I woke up with one of the craziest, most vivid recollections of a dream ever. That nap was only half an hour long too, which is weird because I thought that dreaming/REM occurred at 90 minute intervals?

Either way this gives me hope, because it means that I do have the capacity to recall dreams consistently (I was really starting to doubt this after days and days of waking up with nothing).

Still though, I'm curious. Why is it that it's so easy to recall dreams in these situations, but not when I wake up with my alarm in the morning? Could it be that my REM cycle simply occurs earlier in sleep? Can somebody here more experienced clarify what's going on here?

because when you nap, you usually go straight into rem sleep, and when you wake up, its immediately after rem, so your memory of it is vivid. when you are sleeping during the night, you go through the entire sleep cycle, and are only in rem for short periods of time, then followed by dreamless sleep. when you wake up, its after long periods of deep sleep, so it is harder to recall.

Generally when you get up you memory fades, so try and keep your alarm closer to you.

I am like that too. I can't remember anything about my dreams in the night sometimes, but I remember 4-5 after going back to sleep in the morning when doing a WBTB.

I wake up alot...