How to Remember Your Dreams

A number of our readers have told us that they rarely or never remember their dreams. Everyone has dreams every night, but most of us remember little if any of what we have dreamed. There are a number of reasons you might want to remember your dreams, which I won’t get into here, but there is one main reason that I want you to remember your dreams, and that’s so that you can write down any amusing, upsetting, beautiful or perplexing ones, and submit them to Idle Brains for publication.

Memories of dreams fade very quickly, much more quickly than other kinds of memories, so it’s important to grab them while they’re fresh. Here are some tips for doing that:

• If you’re like me you may have noticed that you don’t remember your dreams as often when you’re busy or stressed out. When you jump out of bed to go do something as soon as you wake up, or you start thinking and worrying about things the moment your alarm goes off, you’re losing out on a valuable window in which you could be remembering your dreams. When you first wake up, don’t get out of bed right away. In fact, don’t even move from the position you woke up in. Take a few minutes to just lie in bed and see what you can remember from your dreams.
• Keep a notebook or a pad of paper with a pen by your bed. This way you can write dreams down right after you wake up. Having the notebook by your bed will also enable you to write down dreams when you wake up in the middle of the night, without having to get out of bed. If you can, it’s a good idea to lie still and try to recall your dream in full without moving before you start to write, but if you are afraid you’ll fall asleep again while you’re lying there and thus forget your dream, it’s probably better just to go ahead and start writing right away.
• I know that I tend to remember my dreams better on the weekends, when I don’t wake up to the jarring sound of an alarm. Try giving yourself at least one or two days a week when you don’t have anywhere to be first thing in the morning, and you can lie in bed at your leisure without an alarm going off. If you don’t have that sort of leisure, try setting your alarm 10 or 15 minutes earlier than you would otherwise, and use the extra time to recall your dreams and record them. If you share a bed with someone else, you might need to ask them to give you this extra time.
• It may also help if you take a moment before you go to sleep to focus on remembering your dreams. This doesn’t mean that you have to recite an embarassing New Agey affirmation; just think about the fact that you’re going to have dreams (around 3 or 4 if you’re getting a full night’s sleep) and that you’d like to remember them when you wake up. Remind yourself that you’re going to take time to remember your dreams before you do anything else in the morning.

This is all pretty much common sense, but I think most of us don’t do this stuff, even those of us who’d like to remember more of our dreams. Try putting these tricks into practice, and let us know how it goes.