There are many people that actually believe that they don’t have dreams. And that is simply not true. You can easily confuse not remembering dreams with not having dreams.
It is scientifically proven that we all have dreams. Actually we have at least 5 dreams in one night but we just forget about them because the part of our brain that stores long term memory is only partially active when we sleep, and the dream is only stored in our short term memory and it is there just few minutes after waking up.
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Remembering dreams consists of two parts:
- Dream Recall
- Dream Journaling
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Dream recall:
Dream recall is your ability to remember dreams after you wake up.
The first thing you should do after waking up is to ask yourself the question: “What was I dreaming about?”. If you can remember anything, try guessing: “Was my dream about work?”, “Was my friend in my dream?” etc.
When you find one event, it is easy to find another. Memory works by association. If you only remember one event, try remembering what situation led to that event or what happened afterwards. Keep doing this until you reveal the whole story.
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Tips for increasing dream recall:
- Don’t think about what you need to do today and don’t move before you have recalled the whole dream. Putting more information in the short term memory can sometimes erase the dream info that was already there.
- After you have remembered your dream, quickly recap the whole thing again and try to find more details about the story.
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Dream journaling:
There are two main reasons for keeping a dream journal.
First, what we write we can’t forget. And the second reason is because you can use the data from your dream journal to find patterns of things that recur regularly in most of your dreams – Dream Signs. A friend of mine who is also into lucid dreaming discovered that most of his lucid dreams start from the same place – waking up in his bed. After realizing this, his lucid dream rate almost tripled.
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Tips for dream journaling:
- Write the dream down instantly after recalling it, the dream memory will be lost if you don’t act fast (the most important thing with dream journaling)
- Keep your dream journal next to your bed. This will remind you to do a dream recall after you wake up.
- Make sure that the journal is reachable from your bed to avoid getting out of it.
- It is useful to include how long you slept, the number of dreams, the number of naps.
- It is enough to write 3-5 main keywords that will remind you of the full dream, you can finish writing latter.
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Dream Signs
After you have sufficient number of entries in your dream journal (10-15) you can start searching for your dream signs. Dream signs are reoccurring things that happen regularly in your dreams. These can be people, situations, places, activities and e.t.c.
For example, one of my dream signs is being in a different country.
These are really important for lucid dreaming, you will learn why latter. For now, your goal is to write as many entries in your dream journal as possible.
Last step for today:
