the BIG remembering dreams topic part IV

I think so. In some way, it’s your definite intention of remembering dreams which made the difference.

When you wake up naturally, you wake up just after a REM sleep phase, that’s why you remember dreams very well. When you wake up from REM sleep, you have a 80% chance remembering dreams. Thus when you have to wake up with an alarm, you must set your alarm on a multiple of 90 minutes (a sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes) for instance, 6 hours, 7.5 hours, 9 hours after going to sleep, so that you wake up just after a REM sleep phase.

Hmm… I have a question about remembering dreams. It seems that now (of course it’s only been two days) that I’m telling myself to remember them and thinking about my dreams in the morning, I can actually recall them a lot better, but I can /never/ remember details. Only the parts that I liked or the parts that were surprising. And never anything but that unless I wake up in the middle of it. Will that improve over time?

Also, another thing. When I dream it seems to always be in third person, like my eyes are the camera. And the me in the world isn’t me. Or at least I don’t think she looks like me, but I can’t be sure. I’m also not really aware of the thought of that me, but the observing me. The one exception is my reoccuring dreams that I’ve had since I was a kid. :razz: You know, where I either battle ninjas and save the day, or play hide and seek with a pack of multi-coloured dogs in a giant maze. Those I see with my own eyes. But the rest I see another person there. I think this just be my poor recall or something. Or my subconcious telling me what I think of myself as. (In which case, I must have really good self esteem since the girl’s always pretty. xD)

I’ll NEVER be able to have a lucid dream at this rate. -.- Suggestions?

Yes, it will improve over time. Unless your a natural, you won’t remember every detail and such. Starting a DJ now is a good idea; i find that when i sit down to write my dream, details that i probably would have a hard time remembering, just fall into place; just like retracing your footsteps. Write what you remember, in as much detail as you can, especially the emotions and moods, and hopefully those missing details will surface. Over time, you’l be able to remember more and more. :smile:

Merged into the BIG Remembering Dreams topic

Hey guys. I’ve been reading up on lucid dreaming on the Dream Views site, and then I discovered this one and read through it as well. I’m trying to improve my recall, because I can’t /ever/ recall my dreams. After about seven nights of trying, I managed to recall a very short fragment of a dream when I took a nap during the day.

When I lay in bed, should I just repeat the same statement about remembering my dreams in my head over and over? It seems really repetitive, and be it the point or not, it gets extremely boring and tends to make me unable to sleep, or I just end up stopping and going to sleep.

Also, can outside things affect my dream recall such as tobacco, nicotine, or marijuana?

Thanks in advance for any help!

When you first wake up do you stay in bed and try to remember dreams? And do you ever remember when you wake up in the night?

I have strategically placed a reminder on my alarm clock to remind me to lay in bed and attempt to remember my dreams. However, it never seems to work for me. I never recall them at all. Also, I hardly ever wake up in the middle of the night, whether I intend to or not.

Edit: Grammar.

Out of interest, how long do you sleep for during the average night? Since REM cycles increase in length throughout the time you’re asleep (ten minutes at first, an hour at its peak), you tend to have a much better chance of recalling something if you sleep for at least eight hours. In fact, if you slept for ten hours, you would dream twice as much in total than you would have just in the first eight. Equally, you’ll dream approximately twice as much in eight hours of sleep than you will in six. You may be amazed at what you remember after a nine or ten hour sleep.

Also, it tends to be a lot easier to remember dreams if you actually wake up directly from one, rather than from an NREM (non-dreaming) cycle well after the dream ends. Given that REM cycles begin every 90 minutes on average, I would try setting your alarm for some multiple of 90 (6 hours works well), so that it will hopefully wake you up while you’re dreaming. Sure, it might cut the dream short, but at least you’ll have a much better chance of remembering something.

If all these are failing for you, you should improve your daily memory so that it will carry over into your dreams. I knew a girl who would record all her daily thoughts and attempted to remember ‘everything’. She did it young, and now she is a natural LD’er.

I usually go to bed around 12am, and wake up at about 7am… so about 6-7 hours on average I suppose. I set my alarm last night to wake me up at 6am, so that it would be at about 6 hours of sleep in hopes of remembering something, but it didn’t work. And once again, I had a very hard time trying to make myself repeat statements in my head while I was trying to go to sleep.

Now I’m as motivated as the next guy, but I don’t think I would be able to make myself write down every thought I had throughout the day. That would be an insane amount of writing, and it would consist of me sitting down and writing in a notebook nonstop all day. I just don’t see that happening.

Wow, I learned something new! That seems pretty logical, looking back at my DJ…

Dream Recall is pretty frustrating. Work on sleeping in when you can spare the time, and focusing really hard on “where was I just now?”

Repeat it exactly 30 times, then forget about it and go to sleep. You will wake up from your dreams during the night and remember them all. It’s the magic number! Seriously. Why? I don’t know; why is the sky blue? Do it and tell us of your success.

As for your questions of outside things. Marijuana is known to affect memory. Dreams recall is obviously not going to be an exception. I don’t know if you meant to say you do smoke weed but if you do. you could try to cut down or avoid it for a while and see if it helps.
Also i’ve read that people quit smoking cigarettes dream more during the abstinence.

The 30 times method did not work for me either.

Lol oh damn it, I was wondering if it would work. It was supposed to work because I told you it would, like a placebo. Oh well.

Hi Xeric,

First of all, it seems that you’re expecting immediate results from autosuggestion techniques. I doesn’t work like this at all. It takes some time.

Then what sentence do you repeat? And why do you wake up in the middle of the night? As Atheist said, you have less dreams in the middle of the night. And it’s no use to practise WBTB or induction techniques if you are not able to remember your dreams. Thus 1) you increase your dream recall. 2) when you can recall about 1 dream per night, you practise LD’ing techniques.

You know that autosuggestion has worked when your first thought when you wake up is remembering dreams. And if you wake up with an alarm clock, as soon as you switch off the alarm, you return back in the position you woke up from. It’s said to be better. Good luck! :smile:

I’m not necessarily expecting immediate results, but I did think that I would make more progress than I have over 9 or 10 nights. I’ve managed to remember three dreams out of 10 days/nights, and 2 of them were from naps I took during the day. I lay in bed when I wake up and try to remember my dreams. Last night was the only one I’ve recalled from a full night of sleep. However, my dreams that I remember are always very vague and it seems like they are in sections persay. I remember little parts of a dream.

I don’t wake up in the middle of the night most of the time. The reason I said something about it was because someone told me to train myself to wake up after each dream and try to remember it.

That’s completely normal, think about yesterday: I bet you can’t remember what happened that vividly and you probably can’t remember absolutely everything. This is no different than remembering your dreams and is normal but you can improve on the norm when you practice.

Making progress with remembering what I dream~ They’re always nice and weird. But sometimes when i wake up halfway through the night I forget to journal and then i forget the dream… Have no time to lie in bed in the mornings… because my mom rushes me off to school…bleh.

end useless post =P

ive only just started trying to remember my dreams, but last night i said before i fell asleep “tonight i will dream and when i wake up i will remember it”. I had a dream and remembered it vividly when i woke up at 5:00am, and didnt bother to write it down! only now 8 hours later i just remembered it! it really helps to keep a dream journal right next to your bed

Oh wow.
I haven’t been able to remember my dreams for a while, but yesterday when I went to bed, I just kept saying to myself that I will remember my dreams, but then in Dutch this time.
I have to say, it really worked. I remembered 6 dreams (and one really vague scene) today, and it took me quite some time to write them all down since they were all relatively long and/or detailed.

I did a bad thing though, when I woke up the first time (that was around 08:00AM, 3 hours after my alarm went off… It was still ringing) I didn’t write down my first couple of dreams. I do remember them quite well though because I relived my dream in reverse a couple of times, just like the book Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming said. However, I forgot one fine detail, I forgot what a girl said to me and actually that was quite important. Ahh well, at least I remember how I felt back then.