Tips for remembering your dreams
1. What you think about and do in the time right before you go to sleep affects not only what you dream but also your ability to remember your dreams. Have you ever had an important appointment the next morning and so you fell asleep worrying about oversleeping even though you set your alarm to go off early? Many times in those situations people end up waking up right before their alarm goes off. This is because if one sets an intention in the minutes before drifting off to sleep the mind will continue to focus on it even in the sleeping state. This week try, in a relaxed way (you don’t want to put too much pressure on yourself or you will wake up in the middle of the night), to fall asleep thinking about the dream diary assignment and how you are hoping to remember a dream. This simple step can double or triple your chances of waking up with some dream details!
2. It is also helpful to put a piece of paper (or a notepad) and a pen on top of your cell phone or alarm clock so that the first thing you see and think of when you awake is whether or not you can remember a dream. Dreams vanish quickly upon waking. Usually after two to three minutes they are already gone. What dream researchers recommend is to turn off the alarm and then lie still for a minute or two and try to go backwards through the plot of whatever you can remember from that night’s dream. The more you move around and do other things the more you forget. Once you have the basic storyline you should jot a few of the main details down and then you can come back to it later when you are more fully awake to type up all you can remember.
Those are the two main tips for remembering more dreams, and through the years I have seen them work for hundreds of students. There are always a few students who continue to struggle to recall anything though, so don’t feel bad if that turns out to be your case. Also, if you have a dream that is personal and you don’t feel comfortable sharing the details I understand. You can just state that in the dream diary and I will not take off points. Good luck on the project and I hope you catch some good ones!
