I think we should continue with the dream theme for a while, don’t you? I know at least two of you do, and that’s good enough for me. Today, boys and girls, we’re going to talk about improving your dream recall.

Let me just say right up front that I know next to nothing about the subject from a personal experience standpoint. I have no frame of reference for not being able to recall my dreams and then, after months of arduous journaling and auto-suggestion, gleaning some conscious glimpse of my unconscious hallucinations. Oh, no. I’m the girl who tries valliantly not to “share” my vividly-remembered dreams of food, death, sex and mayhem because they scare people and who, when I write them down, fills notebooks at an alarming rate. I’ve been late to work because of documenting just one dream, is what I’m saying, and it’s always been that way. I remember dreams I had in childhood. When someone says, “I had the strangest dream last night,” I immediately start assessing whether it would make them feel better or worse to know that my dreams are almost certainly weirder.

Prolific dream recall (let’s refer to that as “PDR”, shall we?) is normal enough for me that I start to freak out a little if a few days go by and I can’t remember my dreams in annoying detail. And that is why I know everything I do know about improving dream… I mean, PDR.

I tell you all of this in the interest of full disclosure. I am fascinated by dreams – why we have them, where they come from, different types of dreams, what we should do with them, how to control them, what happens when we’re deprived of them, all of it. But I simply don’t know which of these methods is most effective in practice, because when I have trouble, simply wanting to remember my dreams again is usually enough to do the trick. So if you try some of them, help me out, please.

I could go on about the stages of sleep in great, geeky detail, but I won’t. Others have done so, others who have PhDs and real jobs and far more authority to do so. I’ll just breeze through some of the basics on what to do once you’ve gone to sleep, achieved REM, and woken back up to tell the tale.

The first rule of PDR is, you SHOULD talk about PDR! If you recall anything at all about a dream, record it, discuss it (with a consenting adult, of course), make up a song about it… anything that helps you catch that little nuance in your memory. Do this as soon after waking as you can, preferably while still in bed.  Everyone has heard about keeping a notebook by the bed, and it’s dorky, but it works as long as you actually use the notebook. (Oddly, I think about David Bowie every time I either write something in the notebook or convince myself that I’ll remember the dream and don’t need to. No, I don’t know, either.) Your cat may tire of hearing how you brought down the hot air balloon army with a rag-tag band of were-monkey preschoolers, but the sound of your own voice, the act of organizing it into structure and story, will help you remember it. This works better if you can do it while still in bed. Yes, the “in bed” bit is important enough to repeat. Think about it, after a nightmare, what’s the first thing you do to purge it?

What if you can’t even get that far? When you wake up you can often pull more unconscious imagery back to consciousness if you lie relaxed in the same position and drift. Pick up any vague sense of the dream you can and pay attention to it. Chances are good that more will come back as you mull over your dream in that half in, half out state. If even that nets you nothing substantial, whatever you have, keep that. Even if it’s just an emotion, or a color, or the word “Syncopy”, or a vague sense of having danced all night, stick that puppy in a jar with some ether and peer at it throughout the day.

Another thing that seems to help is simply telling yourself before you go to sleep that you’ll remember a dream in the morning. Since what you’re essentially doing is training your mind in a new skill, it sometimes helps if you have a map. Tell your brain what you want it to do – make a to-do list. It’s the same principle as eating breakfast while chanting “milk and Froot Loops, milk and Froot Loops, two things that go together, milk and Froot Loops” so you don’t have to write it down. You can’t stick a Post-It on your frontal lobes, so the verbal to-do list is the next best thing. You think you know you want to have PDR, but you get distracted and the part of your brain that knows it gets bored with you and wanders off to surf the internet for LOLcats. So remind it, and inform the rest of your brain, too.

What if all that fails and you’re still an early morning amnesiac? That depends; how serious are you? This is where those articles on the sleep cycle come in. You can, if you’re single or have a very understanding significant other, set your alarm to wake you up when you should be in REM sleep, which is the stage of sleep where most dreaming (and the most detailed dreaming) takes place. You may have to fiddle with this a bit to find out what your particular cycle is. It’s pretty standardized, but of course it varies, and REM sleep will come in shorter, more frequent cycles the longer you’ve been asleep… in other words, if your initial sleep cycle (from REM to Stage 4 and back up to REM) takes 90 minutes, the one just before your alarm goes off may only take 10 or 20 from peak to peak. The REM stages will also last longer toward morning, so they’re easier to catch.  This trick reportedly works pretty well, but for many people the alarm clock itself is too distracting. For another way to catch the elusive REM animal in its natural habitat, try simply sleeping in. If you wake up in the morning and are then able to go back to sleep for an hour or so, you’ll  ease into REM and still be sleeping lightly enough to surface again fairly quickly and, with luck, catch a dream. Then remember to write down anything you get or it’ll all be for naught.

All of this can be enlightening in itself, but PDR is a critical first step in successful lucid dreaming. And for those of us who have raging PDR anyway, it wouldn’t kill us to take some of these other steps like regularly recording our dreams, now would it? If you already have good recall, think of taking these steps as building a habit rather than building a skill.

“But what do I really do with all these wacky dream adventures I’ll remember with PDR?” you ask. I’m glad you brought that up! Tell you what, I’ll put up another post and anybody who cares to can leave a dream in the comments.

Sweet dreams.