Feng Shui, like many Asian customs, are believed to work, but nobody really GETS it until they try it. I believe that if you sleep in conditions as best as they can be concerning temperature, position, and fatigue, you have the greatest odds of a great dream recall the next morning. Is your dad’s house more organized, or cooler in the summer (warmer if you live in Australia) than your mom’s? There’s a bunch of factors that just require toying with until you find the best solution for dream recall.
I’ve been able to remember dreams for 8 days now, some I remember incredibly detailed, others are somewhat vague, but it’s still quite an improvement to me 
But the last three days I woke up not remembering anything. Absolutely nothing, which makes me think “Aww, I wanted to remember my dreams” and I go back to sleep. When I wake up the second time, I remember dreams and sometimes they are incredibly detailed.
How does that work? I mean, is it because I’m somewhat more aware if I wake up and go to sleep again?
That’s great! Congrats on your DR improvement!
Did you wake up naturally when you didn’t remember anything?
I’ve been keeping a DJ for about a week now, and ever since I tried remember my dreams it’s been working really well! I can remember like 2 or 3 dreams a night now, considering I started off thinking that I never dream.
Most of them are pretty normal with just little quarks, like one time I was eating discs (like completely solid, inch thick discs) of pineapple with an ex-coworker. Then one time a dream just took on the ultimate perversion ever… that was a fun dream.
topic merged
I find that whenever I go to sleep setting the intention to remember my dreams (i.e. auto-suggestion), I’ll wake and be completely unable to remember my dreams…
I’ve genuinly believed it would work, so doubt wasn’t the problem (although it is now).
I can usually remember one or more dreams per night… except when I do this.
Is there some reason auto-suggestion is doing the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to?
Does my subconscious hate me or something?
Topic merged into the BIG Remembering Dreams topic
If I stopped remembering my dreams, and for about a week I start remembering at least 1 dream a night, will I still have to tell myself I will remember my dreams?
If you can remember your dreams without having to tell yourself, thats great! Its probably implanted into your subconcious to remember them.
If I were you, I would still tell myself (its not like it a hassle) just to make sure. Perhaps you can remember more tha one dream by telling yourself.
Its really up to you though, whatever works best 
I’ve had a pretty bad dream recall for the past month, just remembering about half a dream once, and just fragments in other nights. I just kept thinking it was becuase of the stress.
But last night, as i was lying in bed, i told myself “You dream everynight, and you HAVE remembered dreams before, so you have NO reason not to remember any dreams tonight. You will go to sleep, you will dream, and you will remember the dream. In fact, you will wake up after the dream, and you will remember it”
I just said that once or twice, then went to sleep normally. About two hours later, i woke up naturally, but was so exhausted i just fell back asleep again; a few minutes later i woke up again, this time thinking “this is the second time you woke up, this could be a FA…check”, but i couldn’t be bothered, and fell back asleep. Again, i woke up for the third time, frustrated, thinking it was probably time to wake up, i rolled over to check my mobile for the time. The moment i rolled over, my dream just came crashing down on me; i sat up quick, and reached for my DJ. It was as if i was racing time and my memory 
, just jotting down whatever details i could remember for later, ended up writing TWO pages of notes, and a couple of sketches. When i woke up for the day, i could remember two other dreams in detail, and jotted them down.
Considering my slow progress over the past few weeks, i felt proud of my sub-concsious, it was as if it were making sure i woke up and remembered it 
. I’ve always had the intention to remember my dreams, but never do as i did last night. Was it what i had said that made all the difference? Or what?
Augh, late reply 
Thanks ^^
I woke up naturally, yeah. Then just fell asleep again without any intention of dreaming, I just wanted to get some more sleep, and then I dreamed.
However, I haven’t been able to remember dreams for three days now. Yeah, just three days but it feels nasty to wake up without remembering the great adventures you had in your dreams.
I didn’t quite wake up naturally when I didn’t remember my dreams. It first started when I my mom’s friend came in my room and told me to wake up because it was 11:30am already. I couldn’t remember anything, I guess the waking thing did that.
If I can’t remember anything when I’m woken by someone/something, how will I be able to remember my dreams when I have to go to school again?
I think so. In some way, it’s your definite intention of remembering dreams which made the difference.
When you wake up naturally, you wake up just after a REM sleep phase, that’s why you remember dreams very well. When you wake up from REM sleep, you have a 80% chance remembering dreams. Thus when you have to wake up with an alarm, you must set your alarm on a multiple of 90 minutes (a sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes) for instance, 6 hours, 7.5 hours, 9 hours after going to sleep, so that you wake up just after a REM sleep phase.
Hmm… I have a question about remembering dreams. It seems that now (of course it’s only been two days) that I’m telling myself to remember them and thinking about my dreams in the morning, I can actually recall them a lot better, but I can /never/ remember details. Only the parts that I liked or the parts that were surprising. And never anything but that unless I wake up in the middle of it. Will that improve over time?
Also, another thing. When I dream it seems to always be in third person, like my eyes are the camera. And the me in the world isn’t me. Or at least I don’t think she looks like me, but I can’t be sure. I’m also not really aware of the thought of that me, but the observing me. The one exception is my reoccuring dreams that I’ve had since I was a kid. 
You know, where I either battle ninjas and save the day, or play hide and seek with a pack of multi-coloured dogs in a giant maze. Those I see with my own eyes. But the rest I see another person there. I think this just be my poor recall or something. Or my subconcious telling me what I think of myself as. (In which case, I must have really good self esteem since the girl’s always pretty. xD)
I’ll NEVER be able to have a lucid dream at this rate. -.- Suggestions?
Yes, it will improve over time. Unless your a natural, you won’t remember every detail and such. Starting a DJ now is a good idea; i find that when i sit down to write my dream, details that i probably would have a hard time remembering, just fall into place; just like retracing your footsteps. Write what you remember, in as much detail as you can, especially the emotions and moods, and hopefully those missing details will surface. Over time, you’l be able to remember more and more. 
Merged into the BIG Remembering Dreams topic
Hey guys. I’ve been reading up on lucid dreaming on the Dream Views site, and then I discovered this one and read through it as well. I’m trying to improve my recall, because I can’t /ever/ recall my dreams. After about seven nights of trying, I managed to recall a very short fragment of a dream when I took a nap during the day.
When I lay in bed, should I just repeat the same statement about remembering my dreams in my head over and over? It seems really repetitive, and be it the point or not, it gets extremely boring and tends to make me unable to sleep, or I just end up stopping and going to sleep.
Also, can outside things affect my dream recall such as tobacco, nicotine, or marijuana?
Thanks in advance for any help!
When you first wake up do you stay in bed and try to remember dreams? And do you ever remember when you wake up in the night?
I have strategically placed a reminder on my alarm clock to remind me to lay in bed and attempt to remember my dreams. However, it never seems to work for me. I never recall them at all. Also, I hardly ever wake up in the middle of the night, whether I intend to or not.
Edit: Grammar.
Out of interest, how long do you sleep for during the average night? Since REM cycles increase in length throughout the time you’re asleep (ten minutes at first, an hour at its peak), you tend to have a much better chance of recalling something if you sleep for at least eight hours. In fact, if you slept for ten hours, you would dream twice as much in total than you would have just in the first eight. Equally, you’ll dream approximately twice as much in eight hours of sleep than you will in six. You may be amazed at what you remember after a nine or ten hour sleep.
Also, it tends to be a lot easier to remember dreams if you actually wake up directly from one, rather than from an NREM (non-dreaming) cycle well after the dream ends. Given that REM cycles begin every 90 minutes on average, I would try setting your alarm for some multiple of 90 (6 hours works well), so that it will hopefully wake you up while you’re dreaming. Sure, it might cut the dream short, but at least you’ll have a much better chance of remembering something.
If all these are failing for you, you should improve your daily memory so that it will carry over into your dreams. I knew a girl who would record all her daily thoughts and attempted to remember ‘everything’. She did it young, and now she is a natural LD’er.
I usually go to bed around 12am, and wake up at about 7am… so about 6-7 hours on average I suppose. I set my alarm last night to wake me up at 6am, so that it would be at about 6 hours of sleep in hopes of remembering something, but it didn’t work. And once again, I had a very hard time trying to make myself repeat statements in my head while I was trying to go to sleep.
Now I’m as motivated as the next guy, but I don’t think I would be able to make myself write down every thought I had throughout the day. That would be an insane amount of writing, and it would consist of me sitting down and writing in a notebook nonstop all day. I just don’t see that happening.
Wow, I learned something new! That seems pretty logical, looking back at my DJ…
Dream Recall is pretty frustrating. Work on sleeping in when you can spare the time, and focusing really hard on “where was I just now?”
Repeat it exactly 30 times, then forget about it and go to sleep. You will wake up from your dreams during the night and remember them all. It’s the magic number! Seriously. Why? I don’t know; why is the sky blue? Do it and tell us of your success.