So hey, last night you spent some time in an alternate reality. I’m totally serious. How much do you remember of your other world experiences?
This isn’t science fiction. I’ll explain. 100 minutes is the amount of time the average person spends in REM sleep (rapid eye movement sleep) each night. During REM sleep, people dream, whether they remember later that they did so or not.
Most people in modern Western societies don’t think much about dreams in general. In fact, they often remember little or nothing of their dreams because they never think about dreaming.
But when you completely disregard dreaming, you’re disregarding about 100 minutes of your life every day. Remembering your dreams can have awesome life benefits.
Not remembering dreams is common and natural. The ability to recall dreams likely served no purpose in keeping our ancestors alive to pass on their genes. A dream won’t feed a family or keep you from freezing to death. A sort of amnesia with respect to our nighttime adventures seems to exist.
These amnesic experiences of dreams have interested me throughout my life. Lately I’ve been exploring more about how our brains work; dreams are a part of it all. The first step in exploring dreams is to remember them. I needed to grow my ability to remember my dreams in order to delve deeper into the what and why of their existence.
I’ve been able to cultivate and improve my ability to remember dreams through absolutely natural methods. I’ve found the following seven tips useful since beginning a quest to improve my dream recall a couple months ago.
- Increase your general awareness of dreams. Realize that you dream every night, and spend a bit of time while awake thinking about dreams in general.
- Make a clear intention to remember your dreams. Just like when it comes to remembering to get that extra thing next time you go to the store, you’re more likely to remember something if you think about it and really resolve to remember.
- Keep a dream journal. This is a journal where you record the dreams that you remember. Even the events of our waking life can be hard to remember. Our memories aren’t perfect. Writing down the things you want to remember can ensure you actually capture the memory (just like making a list for what you need at the store ensures you don’t forget anything).
- Talk about your dreams with other people. This can lead to fun, unique, and hilarious conversations. I’ve found that doing this brings a sense of legitimacy to my efforts to remember.
- When you wake up in the middle of the night, don’t drift right back to sleep. Take a minute to try to remember what you last dreamed, and write down what you remember if you’re keeping a dream journal.
- Get enough sleep. Less sleep means less REM time, and REM time is when we dream. Each successive period of REM sleep we have throughout the night is longer than the last, so time spent in REM is skewed towards the later portion of our sleep periods.
- Take your vitamins. Vitamin B6 may increase dream vividness and ability to remember dreams. My multivitamins contain 25 mg (1250% of the RDI), so I don’t need an extra vitamin for B6. Ginko biloba may help with memory in general. Ginko biloba has been used as food and medicine for centuries and B6 is safe when taken in reasonable quantities (I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking more than 50 mg of B6 per day. Always do research or ask your doctor about any pills you put in your body. It’s best to be safe!)
You don’t have to use all seven of these to experience improved dream recall. Doing just a couple at a time will give you a boost. Using all seven of these tips together has been an extremely powerful dream recall boosting combination for me. I’ve never had better recall. I’m recalling as many as 14 different dreams or dream fragments per night right now.
Once you start remembering more of your dreams, you may experience the occasional spontaneous lucid dream. I’m going to talk more about lucid dreaming in the future. If you’re interested, please sign up for updates by RSS or my email newsletter.