Bedtime and dream recall

Hi everyone,

I wanted to quickly get your opinions based on personal experience with something.

You've all probably heard people say or read somewhere that it's better to go to bed earlier in order to improve recall/your chances of LD. However, I noticed that sometimes, I will go to bed really late and still end up recalling more of my dreams than I do on some regular nights where I've gone to bed earlier. Due to my work schedule, I usually get home at around 00:10 AM and I can't really push myself to go to sleep earlier than 01:30 - 02:00 AM. Even when I do, I can't say that I see that much of a difference.

In fact my girl often remembers more than I do and she isn't even putting any effort into it or trying to remember dreams, which is quite saddening for me. I think that right now I'm just creating mental blocks by thinking that going to bed later will hurt my ability to recall, so it ends up coming true. I really hope it's actually a myth and all in my head.

What I wanted to kind of look into is this - how much do you think the time you go to bed affects your dream recall? What do you think matters most when it comes to dream recall improvement? I'd love to hear from more people on this topic.

Looking forward to some input :)

The time you sleep doesn't affect your dream recall at all. It's the amount of REM cycles you're able to squeeze in. And it becomes more frequent the longer you sleep, so the more hours the better. The reason why we usually sleep at night is because we're not nocturnal creatures. We depend on light to see things clearly. And when our main source of light sets at the evening, it eventually became natural to sleep at night. You could sleep during the day and work during the night for every single day of your life and have the same amount of recall as any other person. (I'm no expert on this, I just picked this up around many different sources across these forums, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Well, I'd say what matters most about dream recall is belief and effort, like with any other activity, along with consistency and condition. The reason why I said the last two is because when trying to learn or improve something new, you always have to be consistent with it, else you're going to naturally forget about it and have to refresh yourself when going back. Your current emotional condition can also play a role in dream recall. It varies with everyone, or may not affect someone at all.

Okay, this is awesome news! I guess it was all in my head after all. I totally agree that belief and effort, along with consistency and condition are the most important factors.

By the way, everyone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I was reading about REM sleep, that waking up during REM should result in you remembering a bigger part of the dream. I figured, considering this, a great way to get good results in improving dream recall fast would be to wake up near the end of as many REM sleep cycles as possible in one night, right?

If this is true, the next thing to work on would be how to wake up at those particular times. I really don't want to use an alarm. I guess if you consistently "program your mind" by thinking about how much you really want to wake up at those times, it will start happening eventually?

You can repeat something like "I wake up after every REM cycle" and it could possibly work. I've had success when trying to wake up at a specific time in the morning with these mantras.

For me consistency, like mentioned before, is key to improve your recall as far as sleep schedules are concerned.
Weekends will always screw me over because I deviate from the norm, that and the consumption of alcohol.

My experience is that regular sleep schedule greatly increases recall, vividness, etc. For me, the earlier I go to bed (11pm is "early" for me), the better dreaming and recall I have, regardless of the total number of hours I sleep. Going to be too late, or varying bedtime by several hours a night I read keeps you in a sort of permanent jet-lagged state where your brain is not operating at peak efficiency.