The NEED for a Voice Recorder=RECALL!

Despite all my training if I get busy with life I still have lots of lucid experiences but do not remember any of it! Recall is a separate skill. You can have a fabulous lucid and with in moments of waking the memory fades to near nothing. That is unless you have been training your recall! Here is how I retrain my recall when it has faded.

I will wake and for 1 short moment; I know I had a dream and I grab the roughest idea of what happened and repeat that in my mind. Perhaps I get that it is at a college and something with a big table. I focus on that and grab my voice recorder in the dark still in bed. I just start talking. If I only repeat college and big table it is fine, but I then tell myself "something just happened to you. Just right now, what was it?
Focus as you would if you were trying to remember a story you heard years ago. This should bring some extra detail out. Perhaps it goes like this-there was something like a map on the table and someone moved it. a few guys were around the table like a meeting.

That is about the level of recall you can expect. You just say those ideas into the recorder and go back to bed using DEILD as you have not moved other than to grab the recorder or use one that is voice activated. I actually find attempt to recall everything and voice journal at that time is not the best approach. You want to be able to try DEILD and you need to barely move and barely wake up. In addition you are doing this to build recall, not just journal.

The next training comes when you wake up. Get up and move around a bit like you might with WBTB. Then listen to your recording. You may easily remember the images invoked or the words may have nothing attached. Your goal is to try and picture why you said those words. Try to bring up images and memories. At first it will be some degree of hard, but with enough use you can quickly trigger memories from the dream and they can lead to new parts of the dream.
That could go like this. You remembered that this dream was about America's civil war. One of the guys around the table was a general and you had kept standing because you had to watch THE DOOR. What was the door? Maybe you remember it was a small hatch you had crawled through to get in. Then you would repeat the exercise with the new information, perhaps remembering you had hid in a cart that was near the wood pile and the secret entrance was there.
You simply use the voice recorder as a tool and then dream journal the stuff you come up with. This will build up astounding recall with time, but it is a use it or loose it sort of thing, recall. Each time you start over it will come back much faster.

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Originally Posted by sivason

That is about the level of recall you can expect. You just say those ideas into the recorder and go back to bed using DEILD as you have not moved other than to grab the recorder or use one that is voice activated. I actually find attempt to recall everything and voice journal at that time is not the best approach. You want to be able to try DEILD and you need to barely move and barely wake up. In addition you are doing this to build recall, not just journal.

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That's a good idea to use a recorder, especially a voice activated one. I usually write the tag words down or enter them into my phone but even that takes too long to sustain the memory sometimes. The one time I was able to successfully carry an original melody from a dream into waking life it was because I immediately whipped out the voice recorder and hummed into it. The memory completely evaporated within seconds and all I had left was the recording, so I guess that says something.


A couple additional, more passive strategies after using tag words: On days when I failed to gather enough of a dream fragment to hang onto and build the memory from or when I just want to recall more than I did, I've often found that simply attempting the recall for a few minutes and then going about my day will result in seemingly random flashes of the previous night's dream minutes or hours later, usually triggered by something I happened to see, hear, or think about. Also, as a last ditch effort, I will sometimes attempt to recall old dreams and write down as much as I can remember from them, basically choosing whatever random dreams come to mind. I've found this almost always leads to more and more "related" memories of other dreams (same location, emotional tone, etc.) and occasionally I'll recall a recent dream such as from the previous night as well.

You know I never would have thought of using a recorder when you first wake up, That is awesome!! I know I have a bad habit of not writing in my dream journal thinking I will remember the dream, but after a long day of work I can't remember a thing about the dream. I was just playing with my phone and there is a recorder on my phone. I usually have it next to me on the table when I sleep. It might be easier to talk about my dreams to the phone as I get ready for work, then type them when I get home. I will come back here and let ya'll know how that goes. :thanks:

Voice recording has been my primary recording method of choice since pretty much my very early practice. It is superior IMHO to written forms for a number of reasons: 1) voice (at least for me) is more recognizable than middle of the night writing; 2) you can speak faster than you can write; 3) VR's pretty much all timestamp the entries so you get a nice map of the dreams over the course of the night time-wise; 3) you can move minimally; 4) you can do it in the dark. It helped me to build very high recall very quickly (including all the standard other LaBerge advice). I highly recommend it. And nowadays, with speech-to-text translation, even if there are a lot of errors, it makes transcribing to an online written journal much faster

This is a great idea. I've been busy banishing digital devices from my bedroom. I used to use my phone and/or laptop as alarm clock, but the light keeps me up and the presence of such devices enables distraction (like, whenever I wake up with insomnia at 03:30AM, I immediately go for my phone or computer). I want to go back to using a regular alarm clock and oldschool dedicated voice recorder (they still make those?).

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Originally Posted by Timothy Paradox

and oldschool dedicated voice recorder (they still make those?).

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They do make them. Very nice digital ones that start recording when you talk.

I love this idea - I have used it before too, mainly because I was trying to write my dreams down in the dark and a half asleep state and half the time I could not read my own writing. The audio recorder helped immensely.

This is an awesome suggestion.

I started using a voice recorder app a few months ago, and it's been very useful. For starters, it is much easier to record large amounts of information quickly. If I use a paper dream journal, my writing ends up lagging behind my thoughts, which is a nuisance. In fact, when I was still using a paper dream journal, I would often forget entire parts of dreams because I simply couldn't write fast enough. With a voice recorder, I can ramble about the dream in full without worrying about the logistics, then record it "properly" afterwards.

You make a good point about how recording devices can be used when you're lying down, and in the dark, too.

Also, this post makes me want to research dedicated voice recorders.

I got to extremely high levels of recall using voice recorder apps. It allowed me to DJ my full entries right upon waking, with the lights out, with absolutely minimal movement. Then, I would transcribe the voice to text in the DV DJ section. Now, with a sound-sensitive wife (who complains about my DJ scribblings in the middle of the night as being too loud), that's pretty much out of the question, unless I go to another room and I'm afraid that would wake me up too much.

I'm pretty similar with the voice recorder now actually. It's funny - my wife happens to not have good hearing, which was frustrating sometimes when we first met - now it's awesome as I'm back into LDing lol.

As many years as I’ve been doing this and I’ve never thought to use a voice recorder. Now don’t get me wrong, part of my dream journey is my love of journaling but not all dreams are worthy and I certainly don’t always have the time so a voice recorder is a great secondary! I agree with others though, I would need a dedicated device since I’m trying to get away from screens in the ‘bedroom.’