Greetings, new to DV as well as lucid dreaming and have a couple questions. This first question goes out to all the other insomniac lucid dreamers out there : do you feel your dream recall is affected by your insomnia? I browsed through the similar threads (genius idea by the way) on insomnia but they mostly talked about insomnia itself and solutions to try and help sleep, not how it correlates to lucid dreaming. Personally, I have pretty terrible dream recall. In fact, until I read that you constantly dream every night and simply don't remember these dreams, I simply thought that I would only dream once in a blue moon. I usually only remember a dream about once every month or so, and most of the time it doesn't seem nearly as vivid as most of even the beginner threads I read describe them.

However, during the early morning hours I can usually at least vaguely recall dreams pretty reliably. This occurs when insomnia has taken hold of me and I stay up until around 4-5 in the morning. Around this time is when sleep deprivation really kicks in, and I actually begin to feel tired. At this point, I can go to sleep pretty easily and upon waking I will have some semblance of dream recall. After waking I can also try and drift back to sleep depending on how tired I am, and have decent dream recall upon waking again. I can repeat this process of waking and going back to sleep if I'm still tired to recall multiple dreams in one day (usually the only time I recall dreams at all). This is obviously horribly inefficient though as it burns through a couple hours of my day and can only be achieved during days where I don't need to be anywhere in the morning/early afternoon.

This morning was one of those mornings where I drifted back to sleep and was able to recall multiple dreams. I started my very first dream journal and jotted down everything I could remember about both of these dreams as I would like to get into lucid dreaming. Does anyone have any tips, other than the main ones posted in the tutorials, to help with dream recall? Clearly dream recall is an important fundamental to have when looking to lucid dream, and as such I would very much like to improve anyway I can. One last question, how long did it take you to achieve lucidity?