How to Be a High Dream Recaller

I’ve recently started recording my dreams through a traditional journal voyage. Though I’m not able to lucid dream often, my progress is quite positive over several months. High dream recall is usually associated with people like me, who are able to recall almost all their dreams daily. Whereas low dream recallers, hardly remember the previous night’s dream or the dream from their early morning REM sleep.

If you are a low dream recaller and you wish to enjoy your dreams later, you should practice several methods and actions to help you remember your dream. I’d like to stress on the first and foremost step –The Dream Journal. Recording your dreams is one of the best ways to analyze your dream world and help your brain to synthesize more thoughts to motivate yourself to dream and also to remember the dream. Alright! The beginner’s question about no dreams even after the first entry can be answered with two words, patience and dedication.

No matter if it is a whole week of zero dream recall events, just keep registering the blank entry and motivate your brain to remember the dream the next day. It is more like a self-induced placebo for your brain to act like an alarm clock to wake you up instantaneously while experiencing a dream and ring a bell to record it. As time flies, you will eventually get used to the awakening during your REM sleep. Sometimes, you don’t even need to wake up in the middle of a REM cycle to remember dreams. In the long run, you will end up training your brain to use the long-term memory to register dream events.

Here are some tips for better dream recall. Remembering the dreams right after when you wake up will be easier if you stay on the bed for a while without any physical movements or any thoughts other than remembering the dreams. Another useful hack is to maintain a very strict sleep timing, i.e. you should sleep and wake up at a fixed time. Before you go to sleep, free up your mind from any thoughts that keep you worried or bothered. If you would love to take a friendly suggestion, I’d recommend you to use the Pale Blue Dot imagination for that. If you already know how to get a peaceful NREM start from the ‘pale blue dot’ vantage point skip over it and try the steps mentioned.

Studies and researches show that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) regions of a high dream recaller’s brain indicates a high spontaneous activity both when awake and while asleep. As the best for dreams to occur is the REM sleep, just before you wake up, it is better to induce wakefulness during that period. Either an alarm clock (not the blaring one) or a sidekick buddy (not the one who kicks) who needs to find about your crazy dreams will be of good aid. The reason why you should be awake is because of the fact that your brain cannot register new information while you are asleep. It needs to be awakened to record the information from the dreams. Once you adapt to record your dreams in your mind and help your brain to be more active during the sleep, your stimulus to the external world will be very sensitive even when you are asleep.

While we still hop around why we dream, it is better to reverse engineer it to trace back to the answer. It could be anything, a tiny detail from your dream that occurs in a complex pattern or a common detail from everyone’s dream. Dreams are always fun. Try to be a high dream recaller to enjoy your alternate world of fun and wonder.

Happy Dreaming.

This post was first published on February 18, 2014.