How to Remember Your Dreams [LIST]

You're trying to shake those cobwebs loose from your brain on a Saturday morning in the hopes of remembering what in the world it was you were dreaming about last night.

I don't know about you but dreams fascinate me.  The places we go, the people we encounter, the situations we find ourselves in, all prove what vast memories we have stored away deep in our brains.  How else can you explain people you haven't thought of in years, or places you haven't been since you were a child, all of the sudden being front and center in your dreams?

The problem though is actually remembering what it was you experienced for the last six to eight hours while you were sleeping?  What they all mean is a completely different story!

According to TheFrisky.com, some colleges are now offering classes to help you tap in to this unknown world.  It's called a Dream Journal Workshop. The format of Dream Journal Workshop was simple: for an entire semester, write down your dreams every night, bring them into class and read them aloud. Then others in the class re-dream your dream,  repeating it back as if it were their own dream, focusing on any parts that stood out to them. Then you take notes on anything that occurred to you in the re-dreaming process.

Here are some other tips:

1. Write a question down before you go to sleep. While you’re getting ready for bed, think of something you want clarity or guidance about. Write it down on a piece of paper or journal and leave it by your bedside. If you remember a dream, write it down. If you don’t remember anything, you write your “waking dream”, which is anything out of the ordinary or dreamlike that happens during your day.

 

2. Keep a notebook and something to write with by your bed at all times. Just simply keeping a pen and paper by your bedside greatly increases your chances of being able to write down your dreams if you remember them. If you wake up in the middle of the night with one of those intense dreams, roll over and jot down a word or two that will trigger your memory in the morning when you can write it all down. The more you write them down, the more you will remember.

 

3. Write anything you can remember down, even if it’s seemingly weird or insignificant. Maybe all you remember was dreaming about werewolf. Write it down anyway. It may make sense to you after days or weeks have passed. Or you may remember more later. Even if you don’t, it will help you strengthen your dream recall muscle.

 

4. Draw pictures if you can. Maybe you’re more of a visual person, or there was something in your dream that can’t be described with words.

 

5. Don’t get out of bed right away. When you wake up, close your eyes and see if you can remember anything at all from your dream. We all like to sleep in until the last possible second. If you can set your alarm ten minutes earlier, you can give yourself some time to try to remember your dream. New research done at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan suggests that our recall of dreams is based on short-term memory. This means that the optimal time to remember your dreams is the moment after you wake up.

 

6. If you remember your dream during the day, write it down. Sometimes you don’t remember your dream in the morning.

 

7. Talk about your dreams with other people. Listening to another person’s dream is never quite as interesting as talking about your own, but the act of giving dreams credence in waking life is a powerful one.