Thread: Other methods for dream recall?

I keep a steady (somewhat) dream journal, and remember at least one dream a night. Are there other ways to increase recall and vividness? Would reading my dreams throughout the day help?

I'm going to read a few of my favorite entries before I go to bed and see if I have better recall. Tomorrow I'll try to read more entries throughout the day, and see if that makes a difference. I'm hoping this will at least bump up my recall a bit. I gotta say, recently I realized how much fun dreams in general are, even non-lucids.

Make sure you sleep enough and have a regular sleep pattern.
I find that if I go to bed too late, I can't remember anything in the morning but when I fall asleep again, I can remember the dream from that.

I'll try to explain my method of doing recall.. let's see how confusing ramble I can get.

First of all, I keep dreamjournal, traditional pen and notebook. It's always beside me where ever I sleep. Every night before I go to sleep, I'll fill the date for the next dream and leave the notebook open. In that way you are already showing off for you sub-concious that you have clear intention to remember dreams and fill them to the journal.

Secondly, I wake many, many times at the night, usually after my current dream ended. I usually filled in the night some keywords because your brain tend to erase the previous dreams or make them fuzzy. After I wake up in the morning I wrtie everything I can reconstruct with keywords and memory digging.

Lately I have stopped filling keywords, first I started it plainly.. for lazyness but then I have trained to remember every dream in the morning without written keywords. The start was a little rocky but after that I noticed that my dream recall is a lot more easier and gathers a lot more memories.

At the moment I can remember and distinguish about 7 different dreams at best. Usually 5

Edit : I also have quite vivid dreams so that of course helps recalling. You asked how to increase vividness.. well some herbs or vitamins can chemically help you, but once you get more LD I think your dream vividness also increases. I don't know why it happened to me like that, maybe due to increased dream awareness. Hope some of this is useful to someone.

A bit of an update. Yesterday I went through my journal and filled in details I remembered from previous dreams but didn't record (for whatever reason), and drew some pictures and diagrams. This morning I remembered 1 short dream, 1 more lengthy dream, and 1 really short dream. I call this a success, and am hoping to keep it up.

I've also gotten better with recording dreams directly after I wake up. This was a problem for me for quite a while, but I bit the bullet and things have been going much better.

Originally Posted by CatBus

I'm going to read a few of my favorite entries before I go to bed and see if I have better recall. Tomorrow I'll try to read more entries throughout the day, and see if that makes a difference. I'm hoping this will at least bump up my recall a bit. I gotta say, recently I realized how much fun dreams in general are, even non-lucids.

You're right, since i've been trying to lucid dream my I started enjoying my dreams, even if not lucid. I treat it like a good movie, since if involves all five sences, and myself

Originally Posted by Yoavwein

You're right, since i've been trying to lucid dream my I started enjoying my dreams, even if not lucid. I treat it like a good movie, since if involves all five sences, and myself

Exactly, they're so much fun.

I've still been keeping steady with at least 3 dreams a night. No lucids for a while though .