For starters though, Why should we really remember our dreams? The mind dumps them for a reason right?
Fist, your dreaming mind has more access to vital information than your waking mind does. Your dreams can serve as window to your subconscious and reveal your secret desires, your fears, and feelings.
Remembering your dreams can allow you to gain knowledge about yourself and your surroundings, as well as general self-awareness and you can even learn to heal yourself. Dreams are truly an extension of how you perceive yourself and others. Dreams can be a source of deep inspiration, wisdom, joy, imagination and overall improved psychological health (cause not all of us are completely sane anyways :P lol).
Learning to recall can help you become more assertive, confident and even a stronger individual. By remembering your dreams you can face your feelings and problems head on, and express yourself with confidence. Dreams help guide you through difficult decisions, relationship issues, health concerns, career decisions, or any little or big life struggle you may experience. Basically, by remembering your dreams you help yourself overcome and come to terms with stressful aspects of your life.
So how exactly do you remember your dreams?
For the following you are going to need a pen/pencil and a notebook and a lot of practice and effort.
Before you go to bed, try to keep a quiet mind. I'm not using clear here because honestly, lets face it, what average joe shmoe who works several jobs can clear their mind? Quieting is just letting things settle and becoming more aware of your surroundings. Let the thoughts just pass through without you over thinking them. Having too many thoughts on your mind can distract you from remembering and before sleep, tell yourself "I will remember what dreamed when I wake up." Through this power of suggestion you are instilling the motivation needed to remember before your brain does it's memory dump.
Set a regular bedtime schedule and wake up time. Make this your routine. Going to bed and waking up at a regular time every day aids in your learning to perform proper dream recall. I also find that writing everything down right after you wake up, no matter how small the detail, helps too.
Avoid alcohol, taking medication, eating fatty foods or anything high in sugar, right before bed. This can hinder your progress.
As I stated earlier, you need a pencil and a notebook, or for those that are tech savvy, a digital voice recorder next to your bed. As soon as you wake up, write everything you can remember down. Having a small lamp next to your bed is also very helpful.
Contrary to popular belief, you should not get out of bed immediately for this. Stay in bed and relax for a minute upon waking, then go right to how you felt in the dream, try to replay it, then write it down.
Write as many details as possible, and don't judge the content, or try to make sense of things. Sometimes your dreams aren't going to really mean anything at all. The idea is to just get the idea(s) down on paper.
Drawing pictures is also a good technique for those who are good at drawing.
Remember, this is not going to happen over night, so don't get discouraged. At first you may only remember a few fragments, but with practice you will be able to work more with your dream and it will be easier to recall. Eventually dream recall will just happen automatically.
Any questions please feel free to leave a comment, and I'll try to answer them to the best of my abilities. If you have non-topic related questions, message me and I'll consider them for the blog here.
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