Hard to keep dream journal.

Well, I want to achieve lucidity, but… a dream journal is really important, but I have a few issues.

*I wake up at 5:30 AM, brutally awoken by an alarm.
*As soon as I wake up, I have no time to be tired, I must hurry as fast as I can, digesting food as if it were wind, take a bath and then head to school.

This makes it impossible to keep a good dream journal so…

Is there any way to remember my dream longers so I can write them later on my DJ?
Is it a problem to write a dream journal later?

Thx.

I know my questions are boring and all, but I don’t like to double post, so if you have an oportunity, please answer my topic :wink:

The best solution I can come up with is set your alarm earlier so that you have more time to do your morning ritual, and possibly squeeze in a few minutes to write in your dream journal. you could offset your earlier wake-up time by going to bed earlier, if your schedule allows it. Also, you could use a portable voice recorder, or the record function on your cell phone if you have one, to record your dreams for transcription later. I hope this helps.

You could write it down later, although you might lose some details. If you keep playing the dream over and over in your head as you get up, it’ll help until you can write it down. The best solution is go to bed a little earlier so you have an extra few minutes to write in your DJ, but if you’re unable/unwilling to do that, just try to keep thinking about the dream until you can write it down.

Hey there Beant, believe me I understand. Neither do I have time for the DJ: I have to wake up early too and rush right away. In the evening 70% of the recall will have vanished plus I would have forgotten 90% of how the experience felt like. (Self-estimation percentages, of course)

I have an electronic DJ. Usually when I sit down to type I try to describe everything as well as possible: environment details, feelings, on-moment-knowledge b[/b], sound of the voices of people whom I talk to, and so further and so on. Conclusion ? I have to take a lot of time for this, which I don’t have in the morning.

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I tried waking up earlier than usual, but even though the alarm rang, my mentality always would be: “Five more minutes.”. :rolleyes:

The only thing which proved to have given some results was writing some keywords in a text note on my phone. This does help in recalling what the dream was about, but you will never get that same feeling of a fresh experience like in the morning. :meh:

Seems pretty hopeless to me too. That is why (starting with the start of 2011) I let the DJ be and went for practicing quick methods, such as WILD and DEILD. It proved to be very hard indeed, but not totally impossible. Going to sleep with the intention of noticing the microawakenings during the night could help as well as mantras or practicing WILD while going to sleep.

However, none (unless you put in a lot of effort, which again requires time and even loss of sleep) can really replace the DJ.

I don’t know how my post could help you - perhaps just to know that you’re not the only one. I wish you good luck and hope you will find a solution to your problem. :smile:

EDIT (after having read some posts):

Of course, going to sleep earlier might be a good idea. However, I tried this only to end up rolling around the whole night in my bed and not being able to find my position. If you’re going for this, my advice would be to either start off with small amounts of time of going earlier to bed (10-15 minutes) or, if you want to go straight to 2 hours earlier, don’t give up once you’ve begun.

I don’t know if you have a problem when your alarm wakes you up, but when I’m in that situation I usually don’t have any recall of dreams, so try auto suggestions…

For two years I don’t have to wake up early and that’s awesome, but whenever I do mostly I use alarm because there is no need for me to practice waking up at early hours but when I do by using alarm there is very much I can recall. Even though when I wake up for WBTB I use auto suggestions and they are very useful…

I keep a voice recorder at my bedside. I always hear myself getting ready in the background while I’m writing my dreams down later in the day.

I understand your problem as I encounter it myself. You have got three options here:

  1. Write down your dreams in the evening, when you’ve got time. Unfortunately, at that time, you will have forgotten 90% of your dream, therefore, a better option is…

  2. When you wake up, have a sheet of paper near your bed so you can quickly write the key elements of your dreams. It takes no more than a minute. Then, when you have time, write your dreams down, looking at those keywords. You will still forget a big part of the dream, but it’s better than option 1.

  3. Set your alarm clock 5-10 minutes earlier. Then, you will have time to write your dreams in your dream journal. After that, continue with your daily routine. This option let’s you remember most of your dreams, although the alarm clock sound can fade some memories away. It is possible to wake up without an alarm clock, using autosuggestion, however, it requires practice and is not fully reliable.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the replies, well, I’ll see what’s more suitable for me, problem is… I lied.
Well, partially, everything up there is true, but the alarm that wakes me up is human, it’s my mother xP, even if I insist for her to let the alarm sound for me first, she will always take it to her room, she has to wake up earlier, and when she’s about to go to work she wakes me up, so, setting the alarm for earlier would wake her up, not me. I asked her to let the alarm with me, so I’d wake up five minutes earlier, write my DJ, wake her up and go back to sleep, then the normal proccess would happen.

But I’d need an argument for that, she doesn’t know about lucid dreaming, she thinks it’s mere bullsheet, so saying I need to write my DJ would be crazy.

Hm… I’ll work my way through it, thanks guys.

As you’re 14 years old I have no idea if you possess a cellphone, but almost all of the kids nowadays have one, so why don’t you simply use your cellphone’s alarm?

If you don’t have one, go buy a cheap alarm to hide somewhere in your room. :devil:

Like I said you can always use auto suggestions and they work very good, I don’t know if they work well on daily basis but try them.

For example when was very hot I usually slept downstairs in our living room because on top floor was way too hot and my parents usually wake up at 5, 5:30 but I wanted to avoid them and I would wake myself at 4 am for almost a week [dooh it looks like I know that this works on the daily basis :grin: ] and they didn’t even knew that I slept in living room, so you can try the same, wake up before your mom does and then write in DJ or just few lines in your cell or on paper…

I use a cell phone, I don’t have one, what belongs to one here, belongs to everyone, also, my cellphone was, what, 45 dollars? Anyways, if I use an alarm here in my room, I’ll wake up my brother that sleeps in the same room. Best sollution for me seems auto suggestion then. But I have ADHD which really makes it a ton harder to concentrate on the mantra. Is this some kind of conspiracy?

Hm, well, that sucks. The only thing besides the already posted things I could Imagine would be to have an alarm that wakes you up by vibrating… but then again I’ve never seen a place selling such a device.

Building one just to keep a DJ would be a little bit too much, I guess :grin:

My method is similar to what Rhewin said.

I also wake up early (5AM) and my alarm is actually a brutal machine that slowly gets louder with each repeating boop. Short story short, I’ve always had trouble remembering vague dreams.

Things I’ve noticed include that if vividness is high, the dream tends to stick around longer than usual. Also, if it’s a lucid dream, I almost always remember it just because all the details are more encoded into memory than NDs.

What I do is when I wake up, whether I keep moving or lay in bed I force myself to recall as much as possible about my dreams. I then either try to write what I can OR I write key points (as many as possible) detailing the main plot line. This is usually enough to recall a lot of minor details.

Hope this helps.

You don’t have to repeat mantra till you fall asleep, it’s not about how many times you repeat mantra but it’s about how you said it. You need to believe and create a mindset that you will wake up after 6 -7 hours, for example, and only a few times is actually needed to repeat mantra… (I repeat it 5 times, no more)

You will have to wake up earlier to record your dreams. If you have a radio alarm clock, try not to have the volume up too loud, but obviously loud enough for you to wake up to it. Whenever you hear your alarm go off loudly, it is a distraction because you are then thinking about it, which can cause you to completely lose track of your dreams. Also, unless your dreams are particular vivid and memorable, it is very difficult to record your dreams later because they start to fade from your memory as soon as you wake up.

Can someone help me with a somehwat frustrating problem?

I started writing in my dream journal this last Monday morning, and that morning my recall was incredible, I voice recorded material for almost 8 minutes. :woo:
However, these two last nights I seem to have had much worse recall; I do remember fragments and I possibly forgot a lot of things when I woke up, but I still have a feeling that it was much harder to actually start remembering something these last two nights.
Why was my recall so awesome the first night and then pretty bad for two nights in a row?
Aren’t you supposed to get better and better memory the longer you write down your dreams?

It can go in waves. Writing in a DJ will help your DR MOST of the time. Not always. Sometimes you just don’t sleep well, or can’t remember things, and that can’t be helped. Just keep with it :smile:

I never keep a dream journal. I just make sure I thoroughly replay my dreams in my head first thing in the morning every morning. If I wasn’t a bodybuilder and adequate sleep and a meal first thing in the morning weren’t so important, I might.