Hi everybody! for the last several nights i’ve been trying to tell myself i will remember and record my dreams. i placed my big, black dream journal next to my pillow so i can write on it immediately after waking up. i slept early and tried to relax but i wasn’t very successful in recalling my dreams. so i took a break because it was beginning to frustrate me.
then just last night i finally dreamed something. it came when i went to bed at nearly 6 in the morning after furiously playing soulcalibur all night long. it was actually uninteresting, but at least i remembered it. i’m beginning to think that dreams and lucidity only come to you when you least expect it, so months and months of trying to coax something out of your head probably won’t help you.
It’s not exactly When you least expect it. It’s more like, you shouldn’t try too hard.
Also. If you are awake a long time you’re supposed to have more REMsleep. But oftentimes you can forget anyway because you’re not rested.
Once again, I’d have to say that it can still differ from person to person. For example, when I first started to write in my dream journal, my recall wasn’t so great, but I could still recall some fragments. I had my first lucid dream in about three weeks from the time I started, although my experience supports your idea. At the time, I was simply writing my dreams, but I didn’t put forth any effort to have lucid dreams just yet. However, the amount of lucid dreams that I had increased once I felt that I was ready to practice methods such as autosuggestion.
That’s the whole point of trying lucid dreaming methods, but like krakatoa said, you shouldn’t try to hard. 
Several nights isn’t long enough to say if it works or not… it usually takes people a while to improve their recall.
Also frustration and/or stress are bad for dream recall and lucid dreaming. So relaxing playing the game plus lots of REM due to lack of sleep was probably the reason you remembered the dream.
Hi falkor,
Don’t you think that some days of trying to recall your dreams is a little short in order to assert absolute statements on how LD’ing works? 
Did you practice autosuggestion to get a better DR?
I must admit it was only a few nights of trying and i wasn’t really very relaxed. i was thinking of somebody i wasn’y supposed to think of, ha ha ha .
But i read somewhere on this forum that one person finally had a lucid dream after he lost interest in doing so after months of trying. i also read in an article that the number of dreams a person remembers depends on one’s personality. if you’re an introvert you tend to remember a lot more dreams. i believe i’m an extrovert.
oh, well. i’m no expert. i guess it all depends on your personality, your state of mind and maybe just plain, sheer luck.
I have a different theory. You said it came at 6am after staying up all night? Well, the same thing happens to me. I always dream more vividly if I’ve stayed up till the wee hours of the morning the night before, until I can barely keep my eyes open. I suspect that being very tired might make dreams easier to remember for some people - a lot of my longest dreams came from nights such as these!