Techniques that Help Remember Dreams

If you are serious about using your dreams for divinatory purposes, or enhancing some other area of your life, recording as many of them as possible is essential. Depending on when the dream occurs in your sleep cycle, it may be difficult to record, or even remember that a dream occurred. That said, you gain more practice, you are likely to be surprised at how many dreams you actually have each night, as well as the variety of subjects.

Controlling Alertness Levels

When it comes to remembering dreams accurately, you will always be well served by at least recording the main details as quickly as possible. This may well entail waking up every few hours, even if that is not normally part of your sleep cycle. In most cases, setting your alarm clock for a specific time may be of some help. Ideally, you should try to figure out what time you have the largest number of dreams, and then set the clock for a short time after that. It may also be of some help to obtain a sleep study, so that you can find out more about your unique sleep patterns. Once you know the amount of time you spend in various sleep states, you will also have a better time of determining which waking points will cause the least amount of disruption to your routine.

Make Recording as Easy As Possible

Even though you may be eager to record a dream, turning on the light and reaching for a notepad and pen may seem like too much work. On the other hand, talking into a tape recorder may awaken your sleeping partner. Fortunately, today there are a number of technologies that may be of some use to you. This includes smart phones, netbooks, and PDA's. Any one of these devices can eliminate the need to turn on a light, as well as give you a chance to take advantage of software that will make it easy to index the contents of your dream.

Many people mistakenly believe that remembering dreams and interpreting them must both be done at the same time. Needless to say, if you are drowsy, or just surfacing from a dream you would rather not awaken from, the very idea of going through a full analysis can send you right back to sleep again. It is very important to remind yourself that taking just a few minutes to write sentence fragments will be sufficient to achieve your goal. In fact, if you can get in the habit of not writing complete sentences, and simply recording impressions, you may just find that it will accelerate as well as improve your dream recall process.

Building a Set of Dream Keys With Dream Control

No matter how hard you try, there are always going to be dreams that occur at odd times, or ones that are extremely difficult to remember upon awakening. If you are accustomed to using dream control to change the content of nightmares, you can also use "keys" within dreams that will help you remember other elements of the dream. For example, if you rarely dream of daffodils, then you might want to remind yourself to use that symbol in an elusive dream. While you may only remember the "key" at first, eventually other fragments may emerge during the day, or even days later. Interestingly enough, once you know how to insert a memory key into a dream, simply relaxing will tend to make it much easier to draw the content back out later on.

As a general rule of thumb, remembering and recording dreams tend to work together. If you do not record your dreams as often as possible, you will find that you actually remember fewer dreams. In a similar way, if you do not record your dreams as soon as possible, you may also find that it will be harder to recall the kind of details that will help you develop a robust dream interpretation protocol. Fortunately, there are many tools and methods available to help you record your dreams, as well as ensure that you capture as many as possible each evening.