Starting to Remember Your Dreams

Everyone dreams. Whether you remember dreaming, it is an important stage of sleep for your body to heal and prepare for the coming day.
(see references after the article)

At every moment you are surrounded by sensory information and your brain is processing a bunch of ideas. Your brain has to choose what information to pass on to your conscious mind and what to put into memory. If you don’t remember your dreams it just means your brain considers them trash that you don't need to be bothered with. In order to start remembering your dreams, you must convince your brain that dreams are important and should not be immediately discarded.

Basically you are trying to train your mind to know that dreams are information that you want to hold onto. Our minds have to filter out and discard huge amounts of information during the day and your mind currently believes that dreams are trash. Writing down anything even sort of related to the act of dreaming helps tell your brain that there is something there it should be paying attention to.

Another thing to keep in mind is that our brain uses triggers to decide when to get rid of information. It could be changing activities, it could be walking from one room into another, it could even be as small as a change of body position.

Finally - it is really important to actually write down words on a page. Writing is a strong trigger for the brain that information is important to us. Often, even if we never look at the paper again, we will have a much better memory of that information, because the act of writing triggered our brain to keep the information in memory instead of discarding it. Don't skip the step of writing things down because it's too much effort, it's precisely that effort that will signal to your brain that it needs to place greater importance on saving any information related to dreaming.

It may take time. Don't give up if you don't get results in a few days. If you've spent your whole life not remembering your dreams, it is going to take time to change how your brain handles those memories. Try to do these exercises consistently. Even for people who always remember their dreams, there are days where the memories are weak and days where the memories are vivid. Give it time and make sure to celebrate any tiny bit of progress. That extra attention will signal to your brain that it is doing the right thing by saving and sharing those memories with you.

1. As soon as you wake up, try not to move at all or think about anything other than your dreams. Even rolling over to your other side can weaken your connection to the dream you had.
2. If you have any sense of anything at all make a mental note of it - Examples - you think you might have dreamed about: a table, the color blue, a certain feeling, a woman, being in a city, a name, being lost, searching for something, seeing your dog, a cloud, etc. Even the slightest hint of something is worth noting. No matter how uncertain and vague it is. It's important not to question or judge these. Maybe they were part of your dream, maybe not. It's more important to collect possible pieces and write them down. Even if they weren't part of a dream, they are impressions in your mind from the place between waking and dreaming, which is very close to dreaming, so write them down, you are getting closer.
3. If you don't remember anything at all answer these two questions:
   What is your first feeling on waking up?
   What are your first thoughts on waking up?
4. You don't have to get all the details before moving to start writing things down. If you have the beginning and some vague idea about the rest, once you start writing you will probably be able to recall a bit more detail. Try not to move a lot before you write. If possible have just a small soft light beside the bed, the brighter it is the more wakeful it will make you. It's ok to roll over and sit up at this point, but avoid getting out of bed or doing anything else before you write. You have a brief, fragile window to remember and record anything from your dreams or the half awake state in between dreams and waking.
5. Start by writing the phrase: “I am trying to remember my dreams.” every day. You are telling your subconscious mind directly what you want from it. Writing is a powerful tool and so is repetition. Keep writing this phrase until you get results.
6. If after a few days you are still getting nothing at all when you try to remember any sort of impressions from your dreams try free association. As soon as you wake, reach for dream pieces. If you come up empty, just start noting the first items that pop to mind:
   Examples: objects like a book, a window, a man, a car, a pizza
   locations like a school, a road, the forest
   a sound, or colors, or a vague memory of something from your past
   While doing this your brain may want to think about something that happened to you yesterday, you might have a song in your head, or there may be something you especially want to do or not have to do. These are all things worth writing down. The point of this exercise is to find things in your mind that might be close to the dream space and point them out to your brain and say “pay attention to these”. If your brain knows you really care about what is there as you are waking up it will tend to save more information from that time and then you should be able to get closer to the actual dream memories over time.
   If it bothers you to record seemingly random, not actual dream things down, I recommend adding a statement such as this:
   “I am trying to remember my dreams. If I could remember I might get pieces such as - “
7. While many people prefer to write on a digital device, I would recommend you use paper for these exercises. Using a digital device is more disruptive to your brain's sleepy state. You want to stay as close to that edge between waking and sleep as possible. With paper you can have a minimum amount of light. You barely need to move and you can write as much by feel as by sight. You don't need to scroll around, put in a passcode, click into an app, look at a screen. Even those tiny actions will wake your mind up. If you are determined to use a digital device, at least take a little extra time to make sure you have pieces clear in your mind before you pick it up and turn it on.

Anything even sideways related to your dreams is valuable to write down because it causes your brain to prioritize sharing that information with your conscious mind and saving it in short term memory (which you can then save longer by writing those pieces down when you get them). Do not skip the writing portion! Just thinking about things, even paying close attention, is not nearly as effective as the act of writing.