Why does good dream recall increase your chances of having

lucid dream?

The emphasis is always on good recall, but why should this improve your chances?

Did you have a lucid dream this morning? You might say “no”, but how can you say that for sure if you don’t remember your dreams? How do you know you weren’t lucid and simply forgot? Not all lucid dreams end with an awakening; my last lucid dream went from a lucid dream back to a normal dream and then had me wake up, so I wouldn’t have been able to simply say “I was conscious right before I woke up, so I was lucid”.

Beyond that, good dream recall familiarizes you with your dream signs. Dream signs are a well-known way to attain lucidity that often gets ignored as people choose to focus on techniques instead of increased awareness. Dream signs also create an anchor to which we can attach a reality check when we encounter them in daily life, giving us better chances a making reality checks habitual.

I often have periods of semi-lucidity in dreams, and I don’t always clearly remember these dreams (unless I’m in the habit of journaling) because they transition into normal, non-lucid sequences.

What I mean by “semi-lucid” is that I vaguely, or reflexively, realize that I’m dreaming but only change one or two elements—I only act on my lucidity briefly. For instance, I might be running from a psychopath in a dream and my fear leads me to realize that I’m dreaming. Knowing that I’m dreaming, I make a gun appear in my hands, but then I “let” myself be absorbed back into the fiction. I put “let” in quotations because sometimes it’s a very conscious choice to lose lucidity, and act out the dream, and other times I’m quickly lulled into unconsciousness again by the illusion.

Lucid dreams, on average, are much easier to remember for one simple reason: it’s easier to remember anything when you’re concentrating. Conscious awareness is partly just concentration; it’s placing your awareness on something on purpose.

When you think about this deeply, you realize that lucidity isn’t an on/off matter. Many dreams have some low level of conscious awareness, but just not enough to make the dream what we ordinarily think of as lucid.

Practicing dream recall is essentially practicing a kind of concentration. When you focus on recalling, you’re quietening the mind and reviewing past feelings and images.

Bah! Thorn beat me to it. :razz:

Seriously, though. Think about it. Can you say for sure you’ve NEVER had a lucid dream? Perhaps you only don’t RECALL having one. I used to believe that lucid dreams were unforgettable… that was, until, I had one one night, forgot about it, remembered it nearly a day later, and realized that you CAN forget lucid dreams.

In fact, it’s quite possible that everyone has frequent lucid dreams… we just can’t recall them. After all, those who don’t practice DR and have never heard of LDing often report having at least one LD in their lifetime.