Recall overload.

Hi there.

Im still in the early stages of learning to LD.
3rd week in now.

So far ive gone from pretty much no recall at all , save for the odd vague memory once a month , to being able to recall 4-5 a week and sometimes 4-5+ on a weekend lie in.

Only 1 'kinda' lucid so far that was more by accident that design i think.

However my question is this -

Last couple of days ive been experiencing what i would call a 'triggered' Dream recall.

When i initially awake i remember nothing at all , total blank.
But when i close my eyes and concentrate i can trigger it to come flooding back
Thing is , it comes back at such a rush! .. its almost as if the entire dream just flashes past my eyes and i suddenly know all this stuff i had forgotten.
It can be a little disconcerting.
Thing is tho , soon after triggering it , its almost as if ive remembered to much and it starts fading , no matter how many times i try to play it through in my head. Invariably i miss stuff when it comes to getting it down on paper.

Should i concentrate on specifics and details of as much as i can?
Or do you think i should try to get the whole dream down in full , but miss alot of the detail?

Cheers.

Use a voice recorder and just say what you are remembering. Play it back later and write it down.

A good thing about recording with a voice recorder is that you can speak a lot faster than you can write and so pick up more detail.

BTW- Most mobile/cell phones have a voice record function. =p

Using a voice recorder is something i had considered , however my wife and daughter might disagree when i start gibbering on at 4 in the morning .

I get enough funny looks as it is.

xD

Try whispering. Sounds funny to hear yourself in the morning aswell. I sound drunk or something.

▲I sound drunk most of the time... :D (Never really been drunk)

Just try to remember both the entire plot of the dream, and as much detail as you can. Although if you had to choose, I'd go with the plot instead of detail because if nothing else, you usually get a crazy story out of it. But I usually have at least one scene from the dream that I remember vividly, with practice you can remember more and more clearly. The hardest part for me is when I wake up and can remember 5 dreams that I had and I try to get them all down before I lose too much detail. What helps me not lose any detail though, is right when I wake up, run through each dream as it happened in your head, that makes the memory more fresh so it lasts longer. Otherwise I tend to forget some of the details from the last dream I get to writing down.

Also, I get the blank in the morning sometimes too. I wake up and I'm like "dammit, I don't remember any dreams" then like 30 minutes later in the shower or w/e I'm doing they'll all come back to me. Sometimes just one will come back to me, then while writing that one down, another one will come out of no where. If you wake up and don't remember any, don't assume you didn't have any dreams, but know that you did, you just didn't remember them all. When I assume I didn't have any, I usually don't remember them later on.

I get the same thing sometimes. I try to jot down the overall plot of the dream on the right hand page of my dream journal. Then, as I remember additional details, I will jot them down on the left hand page, so they stay in some sort of order. This way, I have room to fill in the blanks as I go back and forth between the two pages side by side.

if you are only trying to remember 1 dream this teqnique usuallly works (for me and possibly u) but if ur trying to remeber more than 1 dream per night it probabley wont work. just remeber some of the key points and wrtie them down usually this will cause you to remember. try to make the points unique to what happens in other dreams or something that dosent usually hapen in real life

try writing
1. where you are
2. good situation or bad or neither
3. who was there
4. what u where doing
5. any key point that was very abstract

Thanks for the replies folks.

ill give some of these ideas a pop.
Luckily im only getting 1 dream most nights , so i shouldn't loose to much.
Just gone 2 nights with no recall tho typically.. so hopefully it picks up again.

I found that once you have some recall, and you lose it, it's a lot easier to get back up to where you were. When I stop writing down my dreams, my recall drops down to 1 or 2 dreams a night, but in 2 days of writing down what I can, it's back up to par.

<nod> Much better recall last night.
Tho it felt like i was having to get back into the swing of it.

At first i thought it was another no recall night , but i kept with it and it flooded back but a lot more muddled than Ive had so far.. it took me 35 minutes to make any sense of it , im still confused , but wrote down as much as i could.. Kinda having fun now trying to untangle it.

random fuzzy dreams are better than no dreams :)