Welcome to the DILD class! Quick note: I used to both voice record upon waking *and* transcribe the notes to written form later in the day. When I was doing both I got lucid fairly frequently (according to my usual frequency). And the notes were very detailed and the recall was long. So doing both I think is really beneficial.

What I found was that in doing this, I very often did not need to even refer to the voice notes in order to write up the journal entry perfectly. Something about speaking in to the recorder helped to really burn the memories into my mind, even across multiple wakings.

Now, more often I try to journal mentally during the night so that I remember my dreams through multiple wakings in the morning. Doesn't always work perfectly, but I find that with doing this for a while, I got better at it over time.

The point of this is that I believe it is the act of mentally reviewing the dream many times in your head that is the single most important part of building recall, more than speaking, more than writing in a DJ.

Sometimes I just try to remember a single image from each scene, and often that's enough to recall the entire scene and flow of scenes in detail. Together with the mental image I apply a key word or a phrase, then run over the list of key words/phrases repeatedly, "seeing" the image that goes with the phrase as I go over them.

Those are some various ways you can approach recall.

If you haven't yet, check out the sticky posts at the top of this class on some really good forum theads to read about. I also have some links in my signature that I think are very helpful, check 'em out!