Using Mind Mapping to Improve Dream Recall

Quest for Lucidity
1

I apologize if this has already been discussed; it didn’t come up in a search. Also, long post warning :tongue:.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mind Mapping, it’s a method to organize relationships between thoughts and ideas that is more expressive than plain notes or an outline, and has a more freeform structure. Wikipedia has more information.

My dream recall is pretty good, but sometimes I only remember a few fragments from all the dreams of the night, such as a location, smell, song lyrics, people, etc.
I’ve recently been using Mind Maps to go back and recall more details about the dreams later in the day, and have had much more success than I did with just trying to write out more details.

I start out with the strongest memory (such as a location), and try to place the other fragments in relation to it. For example, if another fragment is a song lyric, was someone playing the song at the location I remembered? If so, who was it and was anyone with them? Why were they playing? If not, was it coming from a loudspeaker? Recalling those additional details can in turn lead to uncovering even more. These are questions one would normally ask when trying to recall more details about a dream; a Mind Map just makes the details easier to see.

The advantage of using a Mind Map is that it’s easier to see potential relationships between items that are not directly connected. For example, using just an outline, it may be more difficult to recognize that the person riding the giant submarine down the highway in one of your last dreams was part of a large group at a different location in an earlier dream :wink:.

This undertaking is somewhat time consuming, and isn’t guaranteed to always work. However, it’s worth a try if you only remember a few fragments but have a feeling that you had a really cool dream that you would like to remember. It works for me most of the time. If you don’t want to draw a Mind Map by hand, Wikipedia also has a list of Mind Mapping software, many of them are free.

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I’ve used the program ‘freemind’ to map my dream themes, but never used it for dream call. If I remember just one fragment, I just keep asking myself what happened after/before that and questions like that.

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This sounds like a great idea, not only to remember more but it’s a coll way to register dreams in a different and creative way :happy:

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@BeRightBack
Freemind is my favorite among the ones I’ve tried. This technique seems to work when the normal what happened before/after type questions don’t directly lead to the whole picture (which for me is more often than not).

@mattias
It definitely makes for a good read when going back over previous DJ entries :content:.

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I have to say, that does sound like a great way to get your dream back fresh into the mind. I often find that, within a few minutes, I’ve forgotten most of the dream, other than a central theme, and that by making connections, I end up remembering two or three other dreams I had that night. I’ll have to try this out.