Automatic dream recall?

It’s only been 1-2 months since I seriously got interested in LD.
The first thing I started practicing was of course dream recall, so I have only done conscious dream recall for less than two months. Mostly I have no problems with recalling my dreams, when I set my mind to it. In the beginning I could only remember 1 dream per night, and very fragmented. Now I often remember 2-3 dreams, and sometimes quite detailed.
However I experience that if I don’t particularly put my mind to dream recall before I sleep, I still don’t remember much.
Before I started consciously working on recalling my dreams, I rarely remembered anything. Since I was very young my dream recall have always been very obscure, and 95% of the time I didn’t remember anything at all.
I know several people that remember their dreams automatically and always have, so I guess there’s a vast difference between people’s psyches, and how much they are in touch with the unconscious.
My question is: If I keep practicing conscious dream recall, can I expect at some point, that it will start running automatically? Any of you who didn’t use to recall your dreams automatically but now do?

Well that’s very hard to answer and even if someone did start to remember their dreams automatically there is no guarantee that you will.

You see, the thing with DR is very much linked with motivation. If you are motivated then DR is much better but the moment when you lose this motivation your DR will drop no matter what you do. So simply try to stay motivated and focus on dreams.

Don’t be focused only on lucid dreams, non lucid dreams are awesome too, and when you accept that and when you start to enjoy non lucid dreams then DR will not be a problem. Of course there is always a “but” DR is very unstable component in this story. Many things can improve or “destroy” dream recall, the worse are stress, exams, emotional changes and such things. Don’t worry, like I said, stay motivated and enjoy dreams, that’s the key…

@dB-FTS:
Thanks for your reply!
I understand that DR is linked with motivation, this clearly reflects my level of recall. I just thought that if you practiced DR intensively during some time, it might sort of embed itself into the mind…
Anyway, I’ll just keep focusing on recalling my dreams for now :smile:

Yeah it should, but I don’t think that’s the really the case. Maybe if you are working very intense on DR for some real time like years then maybe DR will became a normal thing… Because mostly before wanting to remember dreams people usually don’t have a recall or they have a poor one. Even though I know people that never tried lucid dreaming but they DR seem to be better then mine, like I said, a tricky thing… :content:

If you’d ask me, I don’t practice any dream recalling techniques, since for me a simple DJ is sufficient to recall 2-3 dreams. However, if I stop writing dreams in my DJ, after a week or two, I will be able only to recall 0-1 dreams each night. So as long as I have and use a DJ, I “automatically” recall 2-3 dreams.

I started where you started and now I have what you call automatic dream recall. Except for nights with very disordered sleep, I remember always at least one detailed dream. I don’t need motivation for DR any more, of course I have a better DR if I am motivated but it’s not essential. A DJ, as Paulius said, is enough motivation to boost my DR.