Hey! (Plus a few questions)

Hey everyone, just this second registered and am excited to be a part of this community and get my dream on!

I did have a few questions, though, before I start:

1. After you begin to regularly dream lucidly after having kept a dream journal, is it necessary to continue with the journal in order to keep having lucid dreams? I may well choose to continue out of a want to keep track of my dreams, but I can't imagine I'll be able to face the waking up every 90 minutes forever!

2. On a similar note, how many of you did the alarm clock every 90 minutes that some sites suggest? Is it sufficient to simply remember as much of your dreams in the morning? (I put a poll just in case you don't want to write a full reply)

Thanks in advance!

Hi MoSh! Welcome to Dreamviews!

1.) It is recommended, but not necessary as long as you can still remember at least one dream a night. You don't have to wake up every 90 minutes to remember your dreams! You can remember all your dreams in the morning with practice. Waking up in the middle of the night does allow you to remember your dreams better, but a lot of people loose sleep over it. I recommend reading this tutorial.

When I first started out, I just laid still and didn't think about anything BUT my dreams in the morning. That really helps. I used to put a sticky note right by my bed that said 'Dreams' so it was the first thing I thought about.

First of all, WELCOME TO DREAM VIEWS! You'll love it here, it's full of fun information :D

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1. After you begin to regularly dream lucidly after having kept a dream journal, is it necessary to continue with the journal in order to keep having lucid dreams? I may well choose to continue out of a want to keep track of my dreams, but I can't imagine I'll be able to face the waking up every 90 minutes forever!

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I don't dream lucidly regular;y, but when I DO get to that point, I honestly think it's better to have a Dream Journal. The reason why is that you might start to forget you were lucid in the first place.

Dream Journals are what you make of it. It can be a pain to discipline yourself to write down everything you can remember from the dream (and when you just start out, it gets frustrating because when you type a looooong description of your first dream, you might forget aspects from the second one (I know I did at times).

You don't have to type every detail, you can just write down key points (this is useful especially if you want to get back to dreaming again since you jotted down things that can help associate into larger quantities of information later on as you "perfect" your dream journal entry).

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2. On a similar note, how many of you did the alarm clock every 90 minutes that some sites suggest? Is it sufficient to simply remember as much of your dreams in the morning? (I put a poll just in case you don't want to write a full reply)

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During the first hours of sleep, I never really found it necessary to set an alarm clock for those times because dreams are usually short within that time and are typically not worth the effort.

I believe you should at least get 4.5 hours of sleep (it depends on the person; some might need 8 hours of sleep or 6 hours or sleep, etc.) So you have to experiment when to wake up, (if setting an alarm after 4.5 hours doesn't help, keep increasing it gradually until you find the sweet spot; by that I mean interrupting a REM cycle since more sleep means that REM cycles get closer to each other, ergo, the potential for longer lucid dreams).

As for dreams in the morning, you'll usually remember them more naturally the better your dream recall gets, so the only "challenge" really is to remember dreams before that. When I wake up to type up my dream journal entries, I just think of a key word or event from the last dream and jot it down, then I start remembering the dreams before that and write as much as I can before going back to the recent dream.

Of course this isn't the ONLY way to do so, it's just how I've been doing it for myself.

And some people have insane memory to the point that they can remember dreams weeks ago, but keeping steady with your dream journal is ALWAYS a good supplement to have to make it easier to identify your dream signs, which can help getting lucid that much quicker.

Thanks so much for your replies. It's reassuring that my dream recall will eventually improve and make journal-keeping easier.

I think I'll limit myself to one mid-sleep awakening per night, and see how it affects my recall over the space of about a month or so. I'm in my late teens so sleep is sacred to me at the moment!