Diminished dream recall

As I mentioned before, the peak of my Lucid Dream success was in middle school, and now that I am trying to get back into the LD game, I face the roadblock of either just falling asleep and immediately opening my eyes the next morning without remembering my dreams or at most just remembering a vague feeling or a color. What is a good way to sharpen dream recall again, especially since my busiest time of day is always the morning?

You need to teach your mind that recalling dreams is important. If you can’t wake up naturally and without hurry to get out of bed, it’s gonna be hard to recall anything. I don’t think there is a shortcut to improving recall, you need to write anything you can down when you wake up and, when going to sleep, tell yourself that you want to recall more. It takes time for your mind to start prioritizing dream recall, but after it becomes a habit, your dream memories get a bigger priority tag and are easier to recall.

So do we understand that you aren’t practising any WBTB techniques or anything else which requires you to wake up before morning? Waking up at around the five hour mark gives you a launchpad for most of the major techniques, but it also gives you an extra chance to remember your dreams - a chance free of the worries of the morning routine.

If you are only remembering a colour or an impression, that’s good! You are remembering something. Make sure you write it down in as much detail as you can, even if it looks a bit pathetic. Getting into the habit of making some mark on the paper of you diary, however small, is the most important thing.

I find that there is an appreciable lag between implementing some new dream discipline and seeing its effects. I was trying to incubate a dream to meet particular DCs last month and while I was not unsuccessful, I’m now finding that I see them in almost every dream, having changed my conscious goals several weeks ago. This lag is different for everyone and probably seldom the same for any individual, but if you stick with it, your recall will start improving, perhaps when you least expect it.

I have to get ready for work, but I remember sitting in albertson’s parking lot and watching some sort of military exercise in the parking lot, after which the military people started running track around the perimeter of the parking lot, and one guy with white shoes stopped running but kept moving around the track full speed. I made a comment to a dream character beside me that that was very unusual, and the dream character, who was a short guy with thick glasses and dark hair, just smirked and said “An object that’s in motion tends to stay in motion”. I’m not sitting at a table in the parking lot when previously I’d been sitting in my car. That was something else I found odd, but I shrugged it off. I then climbed on top of the store to check its shingles, and started pontificating how shingles are “Attuned to each person’s height and weight.

This is way more that I’d expected to remember.

What’s depressing to me is how slow this site has gotten. It used to be a bustling community.

Regardless, I have been unable to wake up at the “5 hour mark” for wbtb because I’ve been having bad sleep-onset insomnia and often times the “5 hour mark” is when I need to get up and start my morning anyway. There are nights I’ll lay in bed awake for hours before I finally fall asleep.

Mm, I know it does feel slow. I know I joined off the back of the Inception wave, so that was perhaps an artificially overstimulated time…I think I posted the chart before:

It’s not just us! (Off-topic: there was a huge surge in the last few weeks, what’s going on? Should we brace ourselves? :happy: )

I feel your pain about the insomnia. I suffered from that for years, at least 2 hours every night, and I can’t promise myself it won’t come back…thankfully I sleep fairly easily these days, I hope it’ll improve for you too. You did recall an impressive amount that time though, good job!

Could you try waking up just 40 minutes earlier or so and dozing? 30? The biggest challenge with recall is that the day’s concerns flood in so quickly after waking up - the best recall and the best WILDs take place in those golden minutes when you are refreshed, but before you remember where you are or what you have to do today, those Sunday-morning-as-an-8-year-old times where the clock just stands still a bit. It’s hard to recapture, but it can be done.

Next time you go on holiday, make an extra effort to use that relaxed doze time for LDing! Adding it to your work routine can be rough, but once you have the habit it’ll carry over.

My middle school stint lasted from summer 2008 to summer 2009, so I was interested in this stuff before it was cool.

Right before I woke up this morning, I had a very vivid 6 second clip play through my mind of me walking through my front door on a gloomy grey day in the middle of a thunderstorm, and watching somebody steal my nice new truck I had just recently traded my nice newish car for. I could feel the steamy wet from the storm as I ran towards my truck driving away shouting “hey wait!”.