Recalling Your Dreams

"Your mind, while blessed with permanent memory, is cursed with lousy recall. Written goals provide clarity. By documenting your dreams, you must think about the process of achieving them."
Gary Ryan Blair
 
If you don't recall it, it didn't happen. Ask around and you will see, that many people claim not to dream at all. They're wrong. They simply can't recall their dreams. Luckily there is a simple method of greatly improving your dream recall, which is an absolute must for everyone striving to become a lucid dreamer: Keep a dream journal!
 
I cannot stress that enough, because without keeping a regular dream diary, you are most likely going to fail, become frustrated and give up. Not only does it improve your dream recall, but it also has a considerable positive impact on your dream awareness, which alone may be sufficient to become lucid. So the first thing you have to do in order to get started, is to put a pen and some sheets of paper next to your bed. A voice recorder also works, but the act of writing is far more efficient, especially in respect of your progress rate. If you decide to use a voice recorder, I strongly recommend, to manually write down your records later.

Keeping a dream journal
A ring binder of size A4 is a practical solution, because pages can be easily added and rearranged. That way, there is no excuse for skipping when you don't have your dream diary at hand - a sheet of paper can be found almost everywhere. Start a new page for every dream and leave some space at the right margin for additional comments - you'll be thankful for it later, when you analyze your dreams. Don't forget to put the date and page number - in case you need several pages - at the top and if you like, give your entry a representative title.

Recording your dreams
Writing down whatever you can recall from your dreams should be the very first thing to do after waking up. Your dream memories will fade quickly and after only a few minutes, most of it is already lost. But even then, take all effort to dig up as much as you can. Aspiration leads to improvement. Often there may be nothing left, but a faint emotion. Try to describe it and concentrate firmly on what may have caused it. Write down everything you discover. Detail is good, but don't overdo or it may become too tedious on a continuing basis. Rely on your intuition to focus on what seems important.
 
With time, provided that you regularly - that is after every dream - update your dream diary, your dream recall will greatly improve. A week can already work wonders. You will notice that dreams consist of a series of scenes, like in a screenplay, that are more or less connected. For every scene change, start a new paragraph. That way the text is structured naturally and easier to understand at a later time.
 
Identifying dream signs
After you have collected a sufficient number of dream records, you can start analyzing them for dream signs, recurring events that only appear in dreams. Use the margin space you left blank to take notes. Although dream signs are a prerequisite of the MILD technique, their perception alone, which already implicates that you are dreaming, can evoke lucidity. In fact, this works quite effectively, as I can tell from personal experience. All it takes is the knowledge of your individual dream signs and a sufficiently high level of awareness. Both can be obtained from keeping and evaluating a dream diary. In addition, it can be trained by watching for dream signs when awake and further enhanced with affirmations. My suggestion of terming this simple method, which is often falsely perceived as spontaneous lucidity, would be "Associatively Induced Lucid Dreaming" or "AILD" in short.

Discontinuing the dream journal
Many people - including myself, who keep a dream diary and become proficient in lucid dreaming, think that they can eventually abandon the cumbersome act of writing down their common or lucid dreams every day. They are wrong. It may seem to work for a while, but dream recall and awareness slowly decline and the average number of lucid dreams notably decreases, until lucid dreams pose a rather exceptional event again. Learn from our mistakes. If you want to go on having lucid dreams regularly, continue using that wonderful tool, the dream diary represents. Investing time in recording your dreams may seem annoying, but it's a small price to pay for the amazing ability of waking in your dreams. Even if you employ a technique like WILD, your chances of success are much higher, due to superior awareness and recall.

"Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose."
Kevin Arnold (The Wonder Years)
 
Apart from enabling you to dream lucidly, your dream diary soon becomes a valuable personal property, allowing you to remember beautiful, informative or thoroughly weird experiences anytime you want. Having detailed depictions at hand, it is possible to vividly relive the impressions, even many years later. Who knows, what new insights you may gain from revisiting past dreams. Often, when reading in my dream journal, even memories of dreams I thought lost, pop up in my mind.
 
The dream journal is the lucid dreamer's best friend. Don't let it down.