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RECALLING YOUR DREAMS
It is important to improve
your dream recall because it is possible to have
a lucid dream without remembering it! It is
worth getting your dream recall up to a few
dreams per night for exactly that reason.
Becoming familiar with your dreams will also
increase your chances of becoming lucid in one.
First, a quick reminder about how often and for
how long we dream. We have REM dreams
approximately every 90 minutes of sleep, and
while they start off at about 10 minutes, they
increase in length to over 45 minutes. If you
wake up while you are dreaming, you have roughly
an 80% chance of remembering what you dreamt.
Therefore, try setting an alarm clock to 4½, 6,
or 7½ hours after you think you will fall
asleep. This should wake you up directly from a
dream.
The most important part of
improving your dream recall is keeping a dream
journal (a.k.a. dream diary). You could use an
office notebook, artist’s sketchpad, an online
journal, a sheet of paper, or even a Dictaphone
— whatever seems natural to you. Here are some
general tips for keeping your journal:
Write all
your dreams and only your dreams
¨
Write down
everything you remember about the dream.
Phrases, colours, feelings, everything. Write it
down in the morning.
¨
Sketch
pictures into your notebook to help you remember
symbols, places, faces, or whatever you think
you will forget about your dream over time.
Ritualize
your diary
¨
Using a
dedicated pen in a special colour helps to make
keeping your journal more of a ritual.
¨
You might
want to copy out rough notes into a neater dream
diary later on in the day. This helps engrain
the dream in your mind.
At bed
¨
Try to go
to
bed early enough to ensure that you wake
before your
alarm clock
rings. In the time you get, mull over any dreams
you had and do a
reality check.
¨
You may
want to keep your eyes closed for as long as
possible, particularly if you wake up near the
sunrise. Try to use a notebook which holds a pen
and scribble down whatever you can with your
eyes still closed.
¨
Stay in
the same position and run your dreams over in
your head a few times before jumping out of
bed.
After you have remembered your dream, move to a
different position (with your eyes still closed)
that you normally sleep in, and try and remember
other dreams. The position that you are in may
help your brain remember what dream you had
while sleeping in that position.
¨
If you
can’t remember anything, allow your mind to
wander through events of yesterday or issues
you’ve been thinking about. These may be a link
to your dreams.
Throughout
the day
¨
Keep a
small dream diary notebook with you all the
time. It is quite easy to remember a dream in
the day and then forget it by the time you get
home.
¨
Even if
you only get a fleeting feeling of some dream
during the day, note down as much as you can
remember about the dream and what triggered the
memory.
¨
Think
about your dream or dreams throughout the day,
and ask yourself “What did I dream?” several
times. Often, you only get a good answer to this
an hour after you woke up.
You can
try to remember your dream by “back-tracking” —
start from the moment when you wake up, and try
to remember what you were doing before that. You
may even be able to reconstruct your dream to
the beginning.
If you
find that many of your dreams are about certain
items, such as cars and painting, then, if you
cannot remember your dream in the morning, think
about whether it contained your specific dream
signs, in this case, cars and painting. You can
even make a “dream lexicon” — a piece of paper
with common dream items written on it, so you
can read it every time you wake up.
Also, use the autosuggestion technique
to improve your dream recall (see the full
description of the autosuggestion technique in
the next chapter).
Once you have a lot of dreams in your diary, you
can start looking through it for dreamsigns.
Common ones include flying, running to chase
something, and being in an old house. However,
it could be anything, such as crouching,
skateboarding, or having one shoe missing! Try
to look for these dream signs in real life and
always do a reality check when you notice them.
“I Sometimes Remember More Dreams Than The Time
I Was Asleep Could Allow. How Is This Possible?”
You may have had several dream scenes within a
single dream period or some memories could be
from past nights.
It is also possible that dream time doesn't
strictly correspond to real time. Days may pass
in a dream during a single night's sleep. Dreams
which seem to last for hours while you have them
have sometimes been found to actually have a
duration of only a few minutes.
“In What Order Should I Write My Dreams?”
It is usually very hard to tell if the dreams
you dreamt happened in the order you recalled
them. Generally you should write them in the
order you remember them, or in a random order.
If you dream that you told somebody about a
previous dream that happened the same night,
then that previous dream probably came before
the other one (though the “previous dream” could
have been a false memory).
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