6 hindrances to your dream recall
Posted by admin on May 29, 2008 in dream recall, dreams, remember dreams • 19 commentsDream recall is a pretty simple thing to do. You have seen the previous posts, and none of the techniques are overly complicated. And still, remembering dreams is often not accomplished easily. In this post, I give some mistakes that I made in the past, and that you can hopefully avoid.
1) Failing to remember to do the exercises in the morning.
This is a thing that I even now struggle with, after so many months of practicing. One wakes up and forgets to do the exercises. This is especially the case when one starts out with this kind of exercises.
Do not worry! With persistence you will remember to do them. And you will start doing them regularly.
Why then do I sometimes forget? Well, I sometimes get a rough awakening from my kids: 1-5 year old do not wait to get up, they make you come to their room within the next minute or … 
. But do not worry, once dram recall becomes a habit, they will come back without doing the exercises. Or when doing them only one day out of two like in my case.
2) Being tired.
All of our memory is affected by our lack of sleep. Everybody knows this from experience. And dream recall is just a special type of the use of our memory: bringing back what we experienced during the sleeping ours. There is no real cure for that except getting more sleep. Go to bed one hour earlier and you will have more success.
3) Lack of faith in your abilities
Nothing impedes progress more than a lack of faith in you own abilities. The most used quote in this respect is: ‘Whether you think you can or you can’t, you are always right’.
Unless you have a severe (and very rare) medical problem, everybody dreams and thus everybody can remember his or her own dreams. This is a very important point. Everybody can. Yes you too
4) Lack of motivation
Dream recall is not that complicated at all, but if you do not try it whole hearted, you will soon give because the lack of success. It is a simple procedure that everybody can learn, but one needs to be persistent to do it. It will probably not work in the first week, or even the first month. But once you get the hang of it, you will see that you can recall as many or few dreams as you really want.
5) Not making it an important thing
Remember that in the case of dream recall, we need to tell our sub-consciousness to commit the dreams to memory, for us to remember them in the morning. But the sub-conscious has many tasks to perform and moreover is not used to perform this one. So, at least in the beginning, you need to tell it that it is a big deal. That it is important to you. I explained how to do this is this post.
6) Not writing everything down
Write all of your dream in a diary. That makes them important (see previous point). But this one is special. It will allow you to track you progress and once progress is made, it will encourage you even more, and before you know, you will remember almost all of your dreams.
I hope you enjoyed this post. If you have found other things that impede your dream recall, please share them with me in the comments section (which is dofollow btw)
Why do you want to remember your dreams? I read through the posts but I don’t quite see why. I know when I remember my dreams, they’re either so bizarre they make me laugh or so obviously linked to something that had been on my mind. Does remembering them all help you somehow?
HHi TLMinut,
yes, dreams are often like that. Very strange and confused. I plan to make posts on this subject and how to make them clearer and on interpreting them.
but the main clue is to become less chaotic in our thoughts during the day. And the trick to do this is to start training mindfulness (you can look this up in google, because it is a huge topic).
Regarding my motivations for dream recall, I made a post on it, you can find it via the following link: http://astral-projection.gettingrichthecertainway.net/2008/04/why-would-you-want-to-remember-your-dreams/
Olivier.
Many of my dreams have been like a preview to a future occurrence or event in my life. Writing dreams in a journal can be of help even with dreams we might not understand at the time.
I have dreams of mundane events sometimes a year before they come true in real life. I might have a dream of doing some activity in a place or with someone I normally never associate with. In the morning I think, “That was unusual. Why was I in (whatever city) with that person? I don’t even like her.” A year or however long later, work ends up sending me to that place, or events conspire to have me with that person reenacting the dream. It is always something fairly inconsequential and has small effect on my life. I have had more of these dreams than I can count, since I was about 5.
If I am tired I can’t remember these dreams, but I know that I still have them. I remember them as soon as the event occurs. I stopped telling anyone about them since everyone just looks at me funny.
Thanks for sharing Tim. You should try to document those type of things. I know that there are people investigating such coincidences in a scientific way. You could even make some money out of it.
Olivier.
You’re right, I should be writing them down. I used to but let it slip, you know how easy it is to do that…
I will work on it in the future.
I remember all my dreams in details when i wake up. is there something wrong with me? maybe it’s a sixth sense…
Well, if you believe in reincarnation, you could have doen a lot of spiritual work in a previous life. It could also be a coincidence though
I have found that motivation has a big influence on whether you remember your dreams or not. Just mentally saying to yourself I will remember my dreams when I wake up, gives your subconcious mind direction. Then writing them down as soon as you awaken and are still in bed, solidifies it.
i have some real astounding dreams…but even then there is no way I can remember anything about it….except that it was good or bad !
All of my dreams have nothing to do with my reality. I am a positive and healthy person, but I will also something terrible such as blood, someone fell down from a mansion, or I felt being pressed by a shadow chich kept me from screaming and moving.That’s the most scarely things I have in my dreams. Well, most of the dreams are funny though.
Dreams can be very weird indeed, especially if you do not remember a lot of them. I plan to write some posts on how to settle this reality and make it more ‘understandable’
For what it’s worth, I find that sticking to a routine in the last 20 minutes or so before I go to sleep helps settle me so that I am much more able to remember my dreams. It seems like just settling down and being calm makes a difference, for me.
I agree with you Badger, A routine in the evening, and one in the morning, to try to get the dreams back.
Yes, Badger’s right it’s all about sticking to a routine.
Lack of motivation is the case with me
But always used to have selfconfidence
Some of my dreams stick to my mind and whatever i do i can’t erase them from my memory and they sometimesmake me think and help me in choosing my options. So they are a great help too.
I agree that motivation is key.
@Thomas: I also found that dreams can have a profound impact on our lives. We tend to remember those that are important.
The lack of sleep is really messing with my ability to remember my dreams. Sadly I am not sure how to fix that at this point. I have to keep the schedule I have until mid May.