On Dream Recall

One of the most important skills in lucid dreaming is dream recall. If you can't remember your regular dreams, you're also not going to remember your lucid dreams. But it's more than that -- maintaining a dream journal and boosting your dream recall increases your awareness of your dreams and develops your mental sense of understanding the experience of what it feels like to be in a dream. Focusing on dream recall teaches your mind that you are paying attention to your dreams and that you care about them. At least in my experience, these things add up to an increased sense of self-awareness in future dreams, which can convert to lucidity and enhanced presence in dreams.

Mini tutorial for building dream recall

How to increase your dream recall?

By writing down your dreams.

Even if you think you don't have dreams, you probably do. Most people have dreams every night (assuming you get a reasonable amount of sleep and aren't on a drug that inhibits dreams). It's a matter of teaching your brain to remember them.

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Gradations of dream recall

The more I write down my dreams, the better my dream recall becomes. When writing down dreams, there are some obvious signs that differentiate a period of good dream recall from a period of not so good dream recall (by period I just mean different phases in life when I may be more actively focusing on dreams or not).

Here is a sort of gradient, with lowest dream recall at the top and best at the bottom

• Not remembering anything
• Remembering a small fragment, snippet, moment, person, place, feeling. But not being able to say anything that happened or give any details. These often slip away really quickly upon awaking if you don't focus on them and recite them (to harden them into memory) or write them down right away.
• Remembering a small scene. Can remember broad details like what is happening, who is involved, where it is taking place.
• Remembering longer scenes, and with a greater sense of self awareness. Not only do you remember what is going on in the scene, but you can somewhat remember what it felt like to be there. Rather than just remembering where you were or what you did, you can remember the experience of looking around and taking actions. You might remember some surface level emotions you felt and be able to articulate them to an extent.
• Remembering high-detail longer scenes with continuity between them, with high memory of self awareness. You can remember well enough upon awakening to be able to describe precise details, like specific people or their clothing, the color of the sky, the temperature of feel of the wind, tastes or textures (any sensory detail really), navigation and direction. Furthermore, you can remember your emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. You might remember thinking to yourself about the situation or thinking through a decision, or thinking to yourself about what someone else might be thinking or what their motivation is. You might remember remembering things in the dream, of past moments in the dream, or even of things that happened in a different dream from earlier in the night, or even false memories fabricated by your mind while in the dream, or even memories of things that happened recently in real life.

I have experienced all of these levels, from remembering zero, to remembering detailed scenes with semi-complex trains of thought.

You can have a lucid dream with any of these levels of recall (except maybe with zero recall) -- but they are more likely to happen and more likely to be remembered when you have a consistently high level of recall. This in part has to do with what I mentioned earlier -- increasing your general sense of self awareness in dreams by walking through the experience of dreams in your mind in real life, and teaching your mind that you are caring and paying attention to your dreams. Maybe a more direct explanation/hypothesis would be: When you think about your dream experience upon waking, you have an awareness that the scenario is a dream, while you are re-narrating it to yourself. This teaches your mind to do something similar but while still in the (future) dream -- the goal is to have awareness of the dream while you're in the dream (this is the definition of a lucid dream). Awareness while dream journaling may be a way of training for awareness in the dream.

I kind of love the progression of dream recall. In my experience (and I think for most people as well), it is not too hard to progress quickly up the ladder of increasing the quality and quantity of remembered dreams. What matters is consistency and just taking the time to do it. It's rewarding to see progress, and it's pretty linear (which is not exactly true for other areas of lucid dreaming).

The gradation of dream recall is also one of the struggles of my own lucid dreaming journey. As you climb the ladder and start remembering more dreams which are longer and more detailed, the amount of time it takes to write them down also increases. I have this habit of re-building my dream recall, and then getting a point where I'm kind of annoyed at having to spend the time to write/type many long dreams. Then usually I start to slow down on making the effort to write them down, perhaps because I don't feel I have adequate time in my day to do so. (There are other challenges too -- e.g. my sleep schedule can change, like if I am staying up later for social things, and poor/less sleep naturally translates to lower dream recall.) Then after a couple weeks of not putting effort into dream journaling, recall levels can drop back down the ladder. One solution that I sometimes explore is to make sure that even if I remember many dreams in high detail, I don't have to adhere to writing them down 100% (not that I generally do anyway - 100% is never really required) and be more selective in which dreams (usually the more interesting/meaningful ones) I take the time to write down. Giving myself a time limit for how long I should spend DJing may help too, though I've never formally tried this.

All that being said, it is extremely rewarding to build up strong dream recall. I have found that there is insight to be gained from dreams, if only because it makes obvious what your mind is working through and processing. More speculative, but I sometimes think dreams are a sneaky way for your subconscious to re-surface ideas/memories/thoughts that you know deep inside your mind you should be paying more attention to. I like to be in-tune with that. And, of course, I've always found for me that higher dream recall equates to an increased change of having spontaneous lucid dreams, even if I'm not applying any particular LDing technique at the moment (which actually may be a problem in itself because then I don't feel as much that I need to work on specific LD induction techniques) -- and lucid dreams are ultimately what I am chasing.