Stathol wrote:
I can't remember last night's dreams, though I'm sure I had them.
I read somewhere that you can increase your dream recall by maintaining a log that you keep next to your bed. Dreams occur during light sleep stages, and it's normal to wake up several times in the middle of the night just prior to dreaming, You usually don't notice or remember that you woke up because you immediately fall asleep again. But if you make a concerted effort to fully wake yourself whenever that happens, and to immediately write down everything that you can remember about what you were just dreaming (as well as when you first wake up the morning), you'll gradually find that you can remember more and more about your dreams. As well, your dreams tend to become more vivid as they are occurring. Some people will even experience "lucid dreaming" with practice.
I can verify this firsthand.
When I was younger (11 years old), I was fascinated by dreams. I had a huge crush on a gal and I was elated whenever I had a dream about her (nothing sexual). I wanted to unlock the secret of the mechanism in my brain that seemingly was random in assigning things to dream about. I figured that it couldn't be completely random and that there had to be something I could do to put the odds more in my favor.
That was the beginning of my fascination with dreams and a lot more experiments. One of which was that I did not like how I couldn't always recall my dreams or the details were hazy. That is when I experimented with keeping a pad and paper next to my bed and attempting to write down a key word, phrase, or image the very second I woke up. That worked. I don't know how it is for others, but my memory works like a directory on a computer. Once I access the directory's name (key word, image, song, etc.) then the memories come cascading back. So all I had to do was write "Parker Lewis" on the pad of paper and I could then immediately recall forgotten details. There was no need to write a lot. Just a single word or two that summed up a strong image from the dream.
Those experiments led into others, I was curious if it was possible to be aware that I was dreaming inside a dream. I had never heard the term "lucid" until more than a decade later, but that is exactly what I was working towards. And the things I experimented with did indeed work.
If you're curious the thing that first worked for me was to try repetition before I fell asleep. I said aloud "Remember it's a dream" around 100 times right before I fell asleep. My thought was that if I did that enough I could drill it into my head to remember it in the dream itself. After the first few nights of trying this, I was dreaming and I had the feeling that I was supposed to remember something. And then it hit me. I was dreaming. I was so ecstatic that I told the kid I was riding bikes with that he wasn't real and that I was dreaming. He did not like that at all.
As for what I dreamed about last night, it was a cross between plants vs zombies and champions online.