Thread: Dream Journals Necessary?

Short Answer: Yes it is necessary.
I would record as many dreams as I could. Just wake up, sribble a few important notes to help you recall the rest later and then fall back asleep if you'd like.
Why:
1. What's the point of lucid dreaming if your just going to forget your experience ( TRUST me you can, just like a normal dream)
2. The more you record and can recall the better memory you'll have.
3. The more dreams you have written down, the easier it would be to find dream signs to help you dream lucidly.
4. It's nostalgic. Like keeping a regular journal/diary when you go back and read your entries , you'll be like " Oh I remember that" or "That was an amazing dream" sort of like a photo album too I guess.
5. Creativity. The Avatar by James Cameron was inspired by a dream he had in like 1999. I'm pretty damn sure he wrote that down

Yep, like marcher22 said. I pretty much forgot about dreaming for a long time, but when I started keeping a dream journal my recall was slowly coaxed out. When I had my lucid dreams, the only reason I remembered them was because I built up my recall.

Something I've come to get with experience is that no matter how tired I am, if I just wake up long enough to write down my dream(s), I can go riiiight back to sleep, without fail. Maybe it's a little annoying to have to wake up enough to write where I can read it later, but I've always been able to get back to sleep within an hour and not feel bad when I wake. Just a matter of discipline and logic.

When you have good dream recall you will become more aware of your dreams and every lucid dream induction will be easier and when your dream recall is really high you even start to notice your microawakenings during the night and can do a DEILD or something.
The dream journaling is just to pracctise your dream recall and if you want to remember if you even had a lucid dream

If you really don't want to have to write them down as soon as you remember them upon waking, just go through them in your head trying to remember, and then go though it again, and then go to sleep. That way you commit them to memory, which doesn't usually happen with dreams, and you can then write them up after you're finally fully awake for the day.

If you don't commit them to memory while they're still bouncing around in your head then you'll almost certainly forget if you just go back to sleep.

Ideally though you should note them down as you're remembering them, because you'll likely spend more time thinking about them since you write a lot slower than you think, thus you are more likely to remember more details.

Lets say person A LDs every night, but he only remembers one dream. And Person B has only a 50% lucid rate, but she has 5 dreams a night. Person A is going to have 30 lucids at the most, and person B is going to have 75 in that same month.