I’ve read plenty of times that it is essential to have good dream recall in order to have lucid dreams. I have had pretty decent dream recall lately, but mostly due to WBTB! Over the last 6 nights, I remembered 6 vivid dreams, but only 1 of them was after one continuous night of sleep. The rest of them were after me waking up in the morning (intentionally, with an alarm set for WBTB, or just waking up in the morning) and then going back to sleep. I’m still on my winter holidays, so I can afford to do that, but I go back to studying on Wednesday and won’t be able to use WBTB so often. So I guess my question is, is there anything I could do to improve dream recall after just one night’s of uninterrupted sleep? What I’m doing so far is keeping a dream journal (been doing that since start of December), trying to describe every dream with as much detail as possible.
I think that’s because you’re waking up in your REM sleep, therefore you’re canceling your REM sleep and you’re waking up from a dream and many studies proved that one remembers more vivid dreams if he’s awoken in REM sleep!
So this could be crucial for your DR, but don’t worry too much, even though you have school, which I understand you can take short 5 min WBTB, I think it won’t effect your sleep or daily energy, either way experiment and see what suits you the best!
Good luck!
I do indeed understand that I can, technically, dedicate a few minutes each night for WBTB, but allow me to rephrase myself: surely, instead of disrupting my sleep for the rest of my life (bit of over-dramatisation here), it’s somehow possible to just dream after a night’s sleep without relying on WBTB. I tried setting my alarm clock in multiples of 90 minutes like I read somewhere around here in order to wake up at the end of REM cycles, but I take anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour to actually fall asleep, so it hasn’t been successful yet
I don’t see that as disrupting sleep. After some time I started to wake up naturally after 5 to 7 hours of sleep, I record my dreams if I remember any I drink some water go to toilet and then back to sleep.
You can remember dreams without WBTB of course but actually doing WBTB raises your chance to remember more dreams. The perfect solution would be to wake up after every dream but that could leave a trace later on your day. I would suggest that you don’t do anything that is uncomfortable for you so keep it simple and interesting…