Thread: Dream Recall

Even people who barely remember any of their dreams will occasionally have vivid memorable ones. If your recall is poor, there's no problem with starting small. You might not remember entire dreams, but do you remember fragments of dreams, short scenes, maybe a vague sense of a person that the dream involved or the location you were in or a feeling you experienced? Even these types of things can be recorded. If you only remember a small thing, add as much detail as you can, and eventually your recall will build up until you're remembering long scenes or entire dreams, and at that point you don't need to write in as much detail anymore.

Do you smoke weed all day long? That's the only thing that ever killed my recall. Drinking and other drugs can be bad for it too.

Another thing that effects recall is your mental state, particularly upon waking. If you are anxious about something or thinking about it all the time you'll wake up and start thinking about it before you can remember your dreams. Sometimes you'll wake up and be worried about not remembering your dreams and focus on that so much that you won't be able to remember them, though this only happened to me when I was stoned because I held the belief that if I got too stoned I wouldn't be able to remember my dreams. But if you believe that you can't remember your dreams, or that it's hard to it will definitely make it harder to.

Try not moving when you wake up. Just lie there and relax, enjoy waking up and keep your mind on your dreams and how you feel now. If your mind wanders to issues of the day just gently bring it back. If you can't remember any of your dreams write how you feel in your journal, any kinds of emotions or thoughts or really any residue from the dream. If you get into the habit of writing in your dream journal you'll soon be recalling dreams, or at least fragments of them.

Also, do you use an alarm clock? I have a feeling that this makes it harder to remember dreams(you wake up in an agitated state), but I haven't used one since I've been into dreaming.

Thanks for the tips, and no, I don't smoke weed, or drink, I'm a good lil boy And no, I'm usually woken up by a parent, so those things are out the window. I guess normally I was thinking I would need to remember the dream to make an entry in my dream journal, but I guess recording small things can help build that up

Just don't give up. If you keep trying you will get to the point where you remember dreams. Too many people give up and miss out. I have at least 5 friends who I taught all about LDing but they would never keep a journal so they never recall anything.

That was kinda my problem too. I was trying to LD a lot prior, but was never successful. It's only now that I've been trying to keep a journal

Just make it a habit, like brushing your teeth.

i went into a kinda dry spell i guess you can call it, after a couple weeks of remembering 1-2 dreams a night i wasn't remembering any for a month. what i found really helped me the past 2 nights is as your fallings asleep repeat to yoursel aloud "i will remember my dreams" then as your drifting off to sleep say it in your head for a couple minutes. ive had some good results with it

A few years ago I used to say, "I will wake up after each dream period and write down my dreams" It worked really well.