Thread: Exhaustion = Poor Recall?

Has anyone noticed a correlation between going to bed exhausted and having poor dream recall the next day? I started a new workout program about 10 days ago and have noticed a significant decrease in my dream recall. Up until I started this workout program, I was able to remember at least one dream a night and often 2 or 3. But, in the past week, I've only remembered one.

Before I started this workout program, I'd usually go to bed around 12 - 1am. I started to wonder about the link between exhaustion and recall last night as I was fighting to stay awake past 10:30pm. Any thoughts on this?

Yep. I've been exhausted for two days in a row and didn't recall any dreams and just yesterday relaxed and remembered two dreams from last night upon waking up this morning.

I just hope that after some time training this constant frame of mind won't exhaust me anymore, otherwise it'll be one piece of progress pushing out the other...

constant stress for me over the last couple of months has thrown my recall out of the window.
Last week i managed to get some real 'me' time, and succeeded in developing a night time routine, and my recall came back.
Unfortunately, it's all fallen apart again...

Hi FireDancer,

I agree with irishcream's observation: try to keep your mind connected with your inner self and the stress would not affect your dreaming activity, even though the sleeping time is less.

You could even use your gym workout to enhance the lucidity activity! For instance, you might do drills while your mind is focused on lucidity and reality check. A sort of yoga. The routine of the workout's exercises would be useful in this respect.

eXistenZ

Thanks for the feedback.

Last night, I made an effort to go to bed before I reached a state of over-exhaustion and that seemed to help. I was able to recall one of my dreams from last night as well as a tiny bit of another one. I still need to get better at motivating myself to DJ in the morning though. I wake up and look over at the DJ on my nightstand...less than a foot away from me, yet I'd rather just lay in bed and enjoy the last reminants of the night's sleep before getting up for work.

Hi FireDancer,

A couple of suggestions that I apply to myself when I don't have any will to put entries on my DJ:

- I don't force myself. I put some parts of the dreams that can trigger the other details later in the day. Sometimes a title of the dream is enough. I know that a dream report should be as detailed as possible, but sometimes I'm really not in the mood to do that

- I put the DJ just under the alarm clock, as a basement; thus it is directly at hand and this foster my willingness to write something. Moreover I soon remember to write down my dreams.

eXistenZ

Here's a question...does anyone else find, that when they want to write an entry in, it's like all the images from a dream are jostling each other and yelling 'pick me, pick me!'
And then you find as you begin to write, you start forgetting what happened later on in the dream, or struggle to recall it?
Any tips for this?
Because when i woke up this morning, my head was swarming with images, and i really had to scramble to get them down...

I had actually started using your first suggestion a few days ago and found that it's helped. It doesn't take nearly as much time as writing out the whole dream and has helped me remember more dreams. This morning, for example, I jotted down brief details of about 4 dreams that I had last night before tossing the DJ aside and going back to sleep. Those details were enough to spark the entire (or almost entire) memory of the dreams.

Hi FireDancer,

I'm glad that my suggestion worked well!

As to the observation by irishcream:

\"does anyone else find, that when they want to write an entry in, it's like all the images from a dream are jostling each other and yelling 'pick me, pick me!'\"[/b]

Sometimes I had the same sensation. I think that the issue here is that dreaming is not linear, while our writing is linear. A dream is like a complex network of association among ideas; instead the DJ report is a tale in linear and chronological sequence.
It's like to explain a paint with a text.

Putting just words and images on the DJ page in an apparently chaotic order might help. Afterward the links emerge.

When I read my dreams, I often see new links, new ways to tell that story; the structure of the dream unfolds clearer. And sometimes it has more than one structure.

In summary, one shouldn't try to tell the dream's story, but to use the same language of the dream.

eXistenZ

Today I remembered 3 dreams from last night and yes, they started all springing up to my attention but I took it in chronological order and without thinking of others before I write down the first and I was able to write down all the dreams in order without forgetting anything.