Thanks for the tips guys. If you have anything else thats fine too!
About that whole “my alarm clock makes me forget my dreams” topic:
When you are woken up by external means (alarmclock, someone wakes you up etc.) it is very possible that you wake from NREM sleep. When you wake up naturally, you wake up at the end of a REM period.
This is very important because when you wake up from NREM, you will probably have forgotten what you dreamt about in the earlier REM periods. So it would be much better for recall if you could wake up naturally.
The thing is, you do wake up after each REM period, but you are awake for a very short period and you usually don’t think rationally enough to even realise that you are awake. I think you can train yourself to wake up after each REM period simply by remembering that the next time you find yourself laying in bed with your mind drifting , you should awake fully. I have succeeded some with this, and for me it’s the key to remembering dreams.
Hey thanks a million odd2k. I finally know now why it happens. I’ll be sure to try that.
Argh! I’ve been trying to make sure I wake up after I dream so I can jot it down, but I havent had much success!
I was sort of inspired by my last post, so I decided to try this “wake up” technique once more. Tonight was the first night I’ve tried it in a long time.
Anyway, it did work, kind of. I was laying in my bed in a very unaware state, somewhere between waking and dreaming. And I suddenly remembered, I was supposed to wake up tonight. I think I slept about six hours before awakening, so I didn’t really succeed on the earlier REM periods.
I’m not sure, but I think that if you know you have to get up very early this will put some pressure on you, and waking up will become a lot harder. I have no facts to back this up, it’s just a feeling I have.
Thanks well I DID wake up last night, but not for the right reason. Last night when I was dreaming I could hear the storm outside and this got me lucid but it then woke me up! It was too loud! Luckily, I was able to jot down the dream I had, so hey, at least i got one.
One technique that I came up with is to remember dreams backwards. It works quite well once you get the hang of it. When you wake up, immediatly question what you were just dreaming. A large portion should come to mind and when you find that nothing else is arising from your memory, start to retrace your dream steps. Continually question “What happened before that?” until you eventually cover an entire dream. For some strange reason, upon recalling a dream you will find that your mind links dreams together and you will end up remembering a dream before that one. Then you continue the process and if you’re lucky, you can remember several dreams that happened throughout the night.
After I do the brainstorming, then I would proceed to write the dreams in my journal. This technique sounds pretty odd overall, but give it a try sometime and it might help out.