Quite often people tell me “Oh I can never remember my dreams!” and ask me how I seem to remember so much about mine.
While I think it is probably partially a person-to-person thing, there are some techniques I can recommend for helping you to remember your dreams.
The first thing I can say is write your dreams down! Keep a dream journal, like I do (not necessarily a public one) and you’ll find that just the act of keeping a journal helps you remember your dreams. When I first started this, I didn’t remember most of my dreams. Now I remember a lot of them.
It is the nature of dreams that they vanish when we wake up. Get into the habit of reviewing your dreams the minute you wake up. If you don’t do it in the first few minutes when you wake up, chances are they will be gone forever. Stay in bed for 5 minutes and just go over them in your head. Put them into words. We generally don’t remember sights and sounds and concepts as well as we remember words and descriptions, so tell yourself your dream. Summarize it into words. Even better, do it out loud. Even if it is just a whisper, it makes a huge difference in how you remember it.
The next step after reviewing your dream is to jot down notes. This can be a plot outline or just a few key words to remind you of your dreams. For example, the notes I took for my 10-25-07 dream are as follows:
going to go swimming 45 min + several blocks
flooded streets, swimming, left turn arrow
bag is wet, towel is wet, wearing only bathing suit
Tom is there working on something
fancy towel shop
guy pick up my bag—orange!
shouting, get him
other guy, then Tom—Tom gets him and I get my stuff, the guy goes away
photos (mugshots/ids)
other guy wants to put them on the internet, I say no
someone talking on the phone about an illness?
jail scene, parents talking through bars to Asian guy, bugs on walls
parents go into the center area
all the prisoners try to go to center area, but they’re all chained to the bars
plus they are stopped by “guards”
one guard is heavyset woman, wearing a uniform that looks like a store, not a jail, and has the words “paper” and “company” and she is weilding a table knife
Those few notes were all I needed to bring to mind the summary I’d told myself when I woke up. Then writing it, the summary was enough to remind me of the details. What I came up with was this: Dream Journal, 10-25-2007.
updated October 25, 2007
— 10:24:01 PM
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