I went through my old dream journal for 2010 tonight, to count the monthly frequency of lucid dreams. It hit me how some dreams from the earliest months felt like they were years old, while dreams from october to the end felt very recent.
I looked closer, and noticed two points where the sense of distance in time changed abruptly: may and october. Everything before may feels really old, the dreams could just as well have been from 2005.
When I think about it, important things changed in my real life both in may and in october. October, when I got some really old news, also had a record peak of lucid dreams!
To you who re-read your dreams, how long does it take before the dreams seem old and distant? Does real life events also divide the memory of dreams into ‘before’ and ‘after’?
For me, when I read over my dream journal, my recorded dreams still feel vivid and fresh. These are dreams that are about 3 years old. The only dreams that I can remember and feel old are about 10-15 years old
For me it’s VERY dream specific. There are some old dreams from 2007 and 2008 that are still extremely fresh in my mind, while even some of the 2010 dreams are somewhat vague in my memory. It depends a lot on the impact the actual dream had on me when I woke up from it.
For instance, a dream from a couple years ago was so weird and thought provoking that I can still recall it without having to read it back right now. I remember most of the “plot” of the dream, as well as most of my emotions and such.
Usually those are dreams that, when I wake up from them, I’ll think about for a long time during the day.