Thread: Dream Recall Issues

I've recently been stuck in a bit of a dry spell as it pertains to dream recall. When I started my journal at the beginning of April of this year I got about 20 dreams down and then I hit this plateau of nothingness. Perhaps someone knows if either of these could be causing my lack of recall: at about the time my dreams stopped I began playing football (maybe the exercise had some sort of physiological effect?) and I started taking my AP tests (which was a slightly stressful time because if I didn't pass the tests I would've wasted an entire year of classes). I have stopped football and testing is over but still I have not remembered dreams for almost two weeks now. It makes me sad lol. I even started doing a waking journal as suggested in these forums to no effect. Although the first night I did a waking journal I woke up extremely energized. Does anyone know of exercise and/or test stress having this effect on recall?

Same problem, you're not alone. I was up to 2-4 dreams per night. I got to the point where I was just jotting down one or two line summaries of the dreams to save time. Now I"m down to zero a night, about a week later.

I remembered I started a DJ in winter 2010. I had about 2-3 dreams I could recall every night. There were also days where I couldn't remember any dream at all.
I think you, just as I did this spring, are just having a dryspell. I couldn't recall my dreams up to 1.5 month!

I hope this is the same for you. Just mind your sleep rhythm, sleep enough and healthy.

I go through phases. Some times i will remember epically long dreams in great detail, but sometimes i will remember like 1 still frame from a dream. It's been a while since i was remembering properly too, it's almost as if keeping the DJ has had a negative effect for me, as soon as i made my first entry i stopped remembering.

Some months when I really put effort in, I'll get 3-6 dreams per night (never lucid sadly). Now with no effort I usually get 3 dreams per week. It takes 2-3 nights to get my recall back to 1-2 dreams per night and 1-2 weeks of good dream journalism and waking up extra early to go back to bed to get to 3-6 dreams per night. I honestly think having things like school makes me have more dreams and lucid ones at that (though rare) since I go to bed and wake up earlier. Some school nights, I would even wake up 2-4 times per night for a week which made me so tired but it filled my dream journal up so much I had to get a new one. Also, school left me so exhausted I would come home and sleep but napping/sleeping in the afternoon gave poor results for recall and rarely ever reach REM and when I did, I forgot the dream. Another thing I never experience without school in session is when waking up at 6:00AM, I was still tired so I would lightly fall back asleep and start dreaming yet thinking I was just daydreaming and the dream was very vivid since it was such a light sleep. It took a while to realize that they were dreams. I miss those so lately I've been turning my alarm at 5AM during summer just to get that experience but I just wake up and stay awake so I just turned it to 4:21AM so I'll see if that works.

If you want to restart your recall, just remember one dream and than it will take off from there.