You can improve your dream recall ability. It's not fixed. I did it when I was younger. I was lucky if I could remember one dream per month, and I went to remembering around six per night.
Here's how to do it: as soon as you wake up, pay attention to whether you were just dreaming or not. Don't get out of bed and go to the bathroom -- if there was anything to remember from your dreams, you'll lose it by doing this. Dream memories are extremely fragile. What you need to do instead, if you remember anything at all (even just part of a dream, some fleeting image) is get out a piece of paper and write it down immediately, in as much detail as possible.
Once you make a habit of this, a curious thing happens. First, you'll remember more dreams. After a while, you likely won't have enough time in the morning to write them all down. The other thing that happens is you'll dream more vividly. There seems to be a link between how descriptive you are in your writing and how rich your dream experience becomes.
>What you need to do instead, if you remember anything at all (even just part of a dream, some fleeting image) is get out a piece of paper and write it down immediately, in as much detail as possible.
I've had very good luck with a slight variation of this, too -- especially at the start. Rather than immediately waking up and writing down your dream(s), I've found it very helpful to immediately close my eyes and continue to visualize the dreams as I go back over what happened in each. This lets you build up more concise (see: faster-to-write-down) outlines without as much "real world" visual input trying to break those fragile dream memories. This approach might be overkill for writing down a single dream, but IMO helps a lot when you're trying to remember and write down multiple/many dreams.
Curious, I've been doing pretty much the opposite, deliberately forgetting my dreams. Most dreams I remembered weren't pleasant, and forgetting them created a sort of 'blacked-out' period of genuine recreation. Like, I usually constantly think about things to optimize/study/do, and being very aware of what was happening in my sleep seemed to carry over that pattern into my sleep, if that makes sense (if not, then just think that waking up with a nightmare very present on your mind feels less rested than waking up not remembering your dreams). Now I have this place where my mind is actually free, at the small prize of me not consciously knowing what it does with that freedom. Also, getting too involved with dreams seemed related to drugged-like states to me, similar to what user jamal-kumar reported.
This article now makes me wonder whether I might be losing out on some benefits of dream recall. Curious to see what else researchers find about it.
I see it like this: You spend a third of your life asleep. By not "utilizing" your dreams, you effectively waste that time.
dream recall is very easy to learn and even easier if you actively write down your dreams. From there on, it's not much further to start looking into lucid dreams, where you can take control, even over nightmares.
Facing my nightmares in my teens (even without being lucid) was very liberating.
Sure, but are those hours really wasted if they make you feel refreshed? Sleeping is very important in terms of long-term memory organization, health etc. I always felt that those life hacks of trying to learn new skills or solving difficult problems in your sleep were pretty short-sighted optimization attempts, since those hours are not "lost", but indeed very productive, only in ways we don't directly notice. I might reconsider if there is overwhelming evidence of the benefits of recalling dreams, until then I am very happy about what I've achieved in terms of getting restful sleep. In terms of lucid dreaming or facing distressing memories, I prefer doing those things in more controlled meditation or therapeutic hypnosis settings (for which we do have evidence that it works).
yes, I resonate with this! It's exhausting to have this much mental stimulation at night. If I'm woken up at any point I can recall the dream I was just in and they're often really stressful dreams. I've been working with my nervous system and I'm wondering if there's some dysregulation going on that's contributing to my stressful night's sleep (like I'm cycling from fight/flight right into freeze all night long). I also tend to have more stressful dreams in the morning near that time when cortisol is released to help our bodies rise with the sun. Been wondering about that as well.
Yup, can confirm this. Replay as much of the dream as you can once you realize you're actually awake. It's crazy how fast the dream fades from your memory too, every second you lose more and more of it.
Also, the better you get at exercising this, the better chance you have at entering a lucid dream. Best chance for those is also right when you wake up, spend a couple minutes recounting a dream, and then fall back asleep.
The best ones are where you can fly at will, and then you realize you are in a dream. You may still have a few seconds where you are semi-conscious and can "fly".
When I was younger I used to mess with some really obscure shit called oneirogics. It's obscure enough that I can't even google it.
It's basically substances or methods you can use in order to dream harder. Cholinergic (affecting choline, basically the opposite of anticholinergics which are horrible pesticides ruining everything), and other ways (Maracuya (passionfruit) leaves under the pillow with its distinct smell to remind you you're dreaming when you're asleep, WILD lucid dreaming, etc).
There's like communities around these, and they're the wildest things you'll ever experience. Ever since the dream where I jumped off a train that was taking me to a genocide centre, lived somehow despite this fact, and was stabbed by cosmic nazis by bayonets to death in painstaking detail I've never had anything resembling a nightmare ever since (like a recognizance things aren't happening for real and I can just wake up and laugh) and pretty much stopped that shit because it's super weird and even more underground than the illegal drug scene.
I met a guy in Colombia who was a professor who was studying indigenous people doing this kind of thing, hence the maracuya leaf method. It's like another world, where people deliberately dive into their dreams and come back with insights.
There's an extremely interesting paper to me published in Nature Neuroscience which is the best insight into dreaming I've ever seen, as how it's probably an adaptation for anticipation in a virtual reality kind of environment. When you consider when you see animals like your cat or dog
twitch around when sleeping while lightly barking/meowing it makes total sense [1]
One tip that really works for improving dream recall:
When waking up, close your eyes and try out a couple of different sleeping positions. Apparently you recall a dream much faster, if you get in the same position you were in while you dreamed it.
> if there was anything to remember from your dreams, you'll lose it by doing this. Dream memories are extremely fragile
I've always had a natural ability to remember my dreams. And one of the most curious things about my dreams is that I can recall (as in right now) dreams I had decades ago. I can often remember them until late in the day. I can also know when I had a dream I already had years ago (it happens often). It's almost like a deja vu.
I never had a dream diary, but I would like to make one just to find these repetitions, connections, relations, etc.
I thought this was common. I have a few recurring dreams I have had since I was a kid. I may have them once every two years or so, but since they are recurring I can remember them well. I never write down my dreams, though.
Since it's way more likely I'll fall asleep near my phone, I've started tweeting my dreams on wake. I do have to admit, it is getting a lot easier to decipher them for longer afterwards, too.
It's also getting a lot easier to pinpoint the origins of dream contents into things I had been thinking about while awake, too. The connections just seem a lot more apparent.
Since sleep helps cement long-term memories, I wonder if there is a feedback effect when some of the memories are dreams you wrote down from the nights before.
I don't get particularly vivid dreams but I sometimes get dreams of really interesting stories. The dream itself is like a movie, I'm not the main character but I'm just kind of watching it unfold.
What's really interesting is that these "dream movies" always have a half-decent plot. IMO a lot of movie plots are really bad and stick to typical tropes and lessons. My dreams don't stick to these tropes and have actual twists, lessons, etc. Like if they were a real movie I might actually watch it.
For example one of them followed a rebellion against an oligarchy, but it never stuck to any main character. First we're introduced to someone, then eventually new people are introduced, and then eventually the original character dies but we just continue the story focusing on the new people, then even more people are added and they die and so on. So it's a bit more realistic and nobody gets plot armor.
Idk how creative I am, I usually identify as someone whose more left-brain.
I consider myself very fortunate that I have very vivid and often lucid dreams - for 50 years since I was a child. My dreams are like cinematic productions - crazy camera work and all. I dream in color and sound. Many of my dreams have soundtracks. I often wake up in the morning with the soundtrack still playing in my head and I turn on my phone and record. I have dozens of them now. When I was ten years old I had a dream where there was a credit role at the end of the dream. None of my friends had dreams like that so I realized at a young age that I had a gift. It's obviously a very personal gift as no one else can fully experience my dreams. I do write the good ones down and share them with close friends. Of course the nightmares are also very vivid too, and also sometimes have soundtracks. I consider myself a creative person but certainly not exceptionally so. But I do feel blessed to have interesting dreams that I remember.
I realize that I have amazing dreams of intricate complexity and richness but only recall the impression I had of the dreams upon waking. The rich details dissolve away within minutes. I am left only with the sketchy, and disappointing, meta-data--the impression--I had of the dream.
It's just a sign of the times. There was a long period of time when everybody dreamed in black and white, then when color TV was invented everyone started dreaming in color again.
I don't know if it's particularly creative to dream with a sound track just as I don't know if it's particularly creative to dream in black and white. But your brain is definitely influenced by cinema.
i remember my dreams in full details, like the stage, lightning, color, cast, interactions, dialogs, etc.
but mostly only small part of the whole story
music i often hear either when i fall into sleep or wake up, but also when i play it in the dream like a guitar
also i dream of pseudo-code
yeah, sometimes i wish there was a way to screen-capture my dream, because some of them would make amazing blockbusters (like some dystopian lost worlds)
I've often wished for some kind of dream recorder. I have had some very intense dreams, even "inception" style where I fall asleep inside a dream. In these dreams I'll talk to witty people, hear incredible music, see fantastic sights. But once I wake up 90% of the dream is gone and I only remember some highlights.
A weird realization for me is all the events in the dream were produced by me. Yet in real life I'm useless in front of a piano, or a paint brush. It would be great if there was a way to tap into that creativity once awake.
> Yet in real life I'm useless in front of a piano, or a paint brush. It would be great if there was a way to tap into that creativity once awake.
Imagination and technical skill (that is, how well you use a piano or paint brush) are orthogonal domains. The way to tap into your imagination is to develop your technical skill to the level where you're capable of translating what you imagine to the physical motions necessary to convey it on canvas.
I too am fortunate to have frequent vivid and lucid dreams. Some of the music generated in my dreams has been the most beautiful I have ever heard. I've always been afraid that I would have less lucid dreams as I got older after reading statistics on lucid dreams, but it's reassuring to hear that you were still able to experience vivid dreams as you got older
> IMO a lot of movie plots are really bad and stick to typical tropes and lessons
It's a huge problem. I have watched very little American media produced in the last decade because of this. Whenever some coworker talks about how great this new show is, I'll watch it and cringe. It's 90% an A-plot B-plot following the same tired template. Then 10% of it is doing some form of virtue signaling, grievance agitation or other propaganda technique to rile the plebs. I can only imagine people who watch it are desperate for any sort of escape from reality.
Outside the US, at least other countries play with different storytelling techniques. France with their 85 plots in a single story and Korea with their strong single plot driven by the main character's emotion. Plus, thankfully Japan's entertainment industry is going strong by having the different mangas compete with each other until the most interesting stories get adapted into an anime.
You can see it in other media, too. Same tired tropes most of the time.
You can even see it in social media, you can make out the common tropes shaped by the society/culture/subculture/mainstream media and while original thoughts and non-us/them|black/white comments are there, they get downvoted. Which is pretty sad. All the while, everyone thinks they're right and better than everyone else.
Japan's entertainment is not that different imo, most of it uses the same tropes, maybe with a small difference (that they later forget about). But yeah, some actually original content shows up more often.
Japan's entertainment is fundamentally different because the stories are proved in the manga market before they move up the entertainment chain. In America, the same nepotistic cretins write the same drivel - or are hired to fill in the mad libs template for a sequel's drivel - over and over again. Stories are tested by an executive before coming to TV or theaters. Not an audience.
> Plus, thankfully Japan's entertainment industry is going strong by having the different mangas compete with each other until the most interesting stories get adapted into an anime.
That's not really true, it's usually the most popular as it's a money issue. Pick randomly a few seasonals and you'll find that most of them are not that good.
The existence of bad doesn't mean the absence of good. There's next to no good American media produced in the last decade. Maybe even longer. Counter that to a country that regularly produces new, original, captivating stories on a regular basis.
You said that the most interesting stories get adapted into anime, not that there are some anime that are good. The first statement is false, the second is true.
Among the manga market, there is a wide range of quality. The success of an individual manga depends heavily on creating a story worth reading and using that quality to attract an audience. Other factors are at play, and what's "good" is a matter of taste. Still, morbius as a manga would not have attracted an audience, so it would not have moved up market.
Otherwise unknown artists can and often do make a name for themselves by telling a good story, and their story gets boosted by a functioning entertainment industry.
Contrast that to America's entertainment industry. A filthy and incestuous cabal of people decide what does and doesn't make it. Ideological zealotry required to step foot at the gates. Serial rapists as the gatekeepers using their power to take advantage of others.
I recall dreams seeming to follow movie-like structure sometimes. At least once, there was an additional thing: it seemed I was aware I was an observer of some story directed by someone else, and I was critically aware of tropes and artistic choices the creator was making.
(Maybe I'd been watching a lot of movies or TV shows at the time, not very immersed, and some of that audience mode was just getting tickled by the GC cycle?)
I have similar dreams sometimes, but in the first person. I meet people in my dreams and have interesting, complex conversations (at least they feel that way in the dream). I usually have lucid dreams too-- or it could be that these are the ones I usually remember. Oddly, I will sometimes know when I am about to wake up and I'll say goodbye to the folks I've met.
How does one know that you don't create the dream at the point that you're explaining it? Like a false memory.
Thinking up an idea and remembering an idea probably have similar patterns on EEG. I guess that experiment has been done?
At times I've had pretty interesting dreams, but since I was a teen (decades ago) wondered if perhaps the dream was made on the spot as I "remembered" it. Provided the creative part kept ahead of the "recall" part then it seems doable.
I wonder if there could be negatives to greater dream recall, processing memories of dreams sounds like extra work for your finite brain functions to handle.
I once woke from a dream with a sense of religious injunction, and still have the name I was "given" as a curiosity in my life, "St Athanasius of Lubensk". I had never heard of the forename nor the place at the time of the dream. Research showed them to separately be something. If you have details, let me know.
> How does one know that you don't create the dream at the point that you're explaining it? Like a false memory.
That's a good question, especially since the "people who can frequently recall their dreams tend to be more creative". It might be a self-report effect.
Another thing that the article seems to skip is the fact that it's doesn't try to measure only recall, but also the actual presence of dreams (you can't recall if you don't dream). There's no way to tell the difference. Plus the usual limitations of such studies: the manipulation (short sleep for the measurements and sleep deprivation in the non-measurement period), and bad statistical practices (NHST, calling higher p values proof of absence).
Athanasius is greek for "immortal" and is a common name of saints, church fathers etc. Lubensk (Лубенськ) is an obscure city near Luhansk. Saint Athanasius of Lubensk refers to Athanasius III of Constantinople, saint of the Orthodox church known as an "enlightener", who died near Lubensk. According to the Wikipedia article[1] he sometimes appears to people in dream visions, so your experience is not entirely without precedent.
This was a common objection to the notion of Lucid Dreaming for a long time. Scientists accused lucid dreamers of making up a post-hoc story about being in control.
Finally Stephen LaBerge did a study where he was able to move his eyeballs in a distinct pattern during the REM phase [1], proving that he had conscious control while asleep.
> At times I've had pretty interesting dreams, but since I was a teen (decades ago) wondered if perhaps the dream was made on the spot as I "remembered" it.
This is easily disproved by observing that people sometimes mutter in their sleep as they dream. Cats/dogs vocalize and twitch while dreaming too sometimes.
Not necessarily, unless you have some decent data on this to share? Not everyone might mutter in their sleep. The overlap between the people who mutter and those who self-report might be minimal. Muttering behaviour might have an unexpected relationship with dream recall, etc.
I guess I understood the claim to be universal, that is that all dreams are constructed purely at the point of waking. If it is not, then what I said is indeed not good evidence for the negation of the claim.
However, the possibility that some people dream for real while others simply construct faux memories on the point of waking up seems very stretched to me personally.
If you're asking about specific individual experiences, I've personally experienced people talking in their sleep about something, then waking up and explaining what it was about, with perfect consistency. I've also experienced this myself (having other people witness me doing so).
I believe I recall that lucid dreaming tests were done where you would signal you were lucid via some eye movement. Pairing the eye movement with the recall after the fact would seem to show its not all made up at the time of recovery, though perhaps it could be expanded upon at recall time.
> How does one know that you don't create the dream at the point that you're explaining it? Like a false memory.
i would venture an explanation, but i'm not sure if your comment was real or just something i thought of as i started typing into this box, and even if i did explain, i wouldn't trust you to understand my reply as something that you didn't imagine.
When I learned about lucid dreaming in my 20s, I spent an inordinate amount of time (every day for years) developing the skill, including journaling — in as much detail as possible — my dream as soon as I woke up. Unfortunately, I cannot turn off the ability now and now have to deal with the consequence of recalling all my dreams: good and bad.
I did the same thing in college and learned fairly quickly that I don't really care to remember all of my dreams. Nights where I remember all of my dreams don't feel restful and are sort of disorienting.
It's hard to describe exactly what was so unpleasant about it for me, but there's some element of time perception involved...it was as though my memories of dreams were encoded on the same track as my waking memories, and my days were missing the "pause between songs" so to speak.
Thankfully, at least for me, this is an effect that goes away quickly after I stop keeping a dream journal. I have had a similar effect when stressed/overworked, though, where I start dreaming in code. That's terrible.
The "unrestful" part, I am familiar with it from my chess dreams. Sometime I would dream of a position on a chessboard and of course have to think about what the best move is. Threads are everywhere. It takes time to figure out the move. When I finally have the move, the board grows and suddenly there might be a bishop somewhere far away on that grown board destroying all my "best move" plans. The cycle starts anew.
After such a dream, when I wake up, I really feel like "damn, I should have found the best move and shown them!" but also like my brain is burned out from thinking so much and visualizing so much in my mind. Not restful.
But fortunately I have better dreams as well and sometimes, when I feel lonely, my brain turns on self-healing mode or something and I dream of someone I love. I will gladly take all the exhausting dreams, to keep the good ones.
The "dreaming in code" thing is just awful. The worst sleeps I've ever had were filled with a tormenting "problem" to "solve" which was just pure absurd abstract theorizing, attempting to fit bits and pieces together that had no tangible relation to a real world problem.
Like you, this has always happened to me when I have been stressed and overworked, usually if I've spent a whole day rushing to get something completed that is a little difficult and I haven't appropriately broken down a problem into manageable chunks.
I'm curious what you consider to be the bad consequences of recalling your dreams? I remember at least one dream every night and enjoy going back over any of them.
I especially like that I can identify a dream as the cause if I wake up in a weird mood. I worry that if I didn't have this recall, I might wake up just being vaguely pissed at my husband (because he was being a jerk in a dream).
But lucid dreamers can often control the nightmares. I can anyway; if I don’t like the dream, I just change it a bit. I enjoy nightmares usually though, but probably because I know I can change them or wake up at will.
I have a similar story to the comment you're replying to and remember most, if not all, of my dreams each night -- which are almost entirely vivid nightmares I'd prefer not to remember. Lucid dreaming is a skill that can help (waking up or taking control when you recognize a nightmare is a dream), but IME it's high-effort enough to maintain the skill that I now just try to sleep as little as I can instead.
I used to have a lot of lucid dreams where I was able to spot I'm in a dream and start controlling what happens. The caveat was that my subconscious stopped making any effort, and I had to really consciously make things happen in the dream. Turns out I wasn't very creative in that state, and my lucid dreams went stale really fast. I'm glad it's over now.
I have episodic insomnia, and have prescriptions for drugs like zolpidem (Ambien) and etizolam, but I don't like to use them, so I am always on the look out for less-crazy things that other people say them sleep.
Recently I tried the supplement cocktail[1] that neuroscience podcaster Andrew Huberman has mentioned he sometimes uses: magnesium threonate, epigenin, and L-theanine.
While this does indeed make it easier for me to fall asleep, I also noticed that it consistently produces weirder and more memorable dreams than I normally have.
While I doubt there is a causal relationship between remembering your dreams and the creativity benefits described in this article, I do prefer to have wild dreams and remember them. If that describes you, too, you might experiment with these supplements and see if they have a similar effect.
I have this ability, and it’s not as wonderful as it sounds. I think I might have posted about it before. The thing is, it’s sometimes better to forget than to remember. I am sometimes haunted by my dream memories because they are too vivid, too real, and interfere with my other memories. I have intense memories of dreams stretching back many, many years, and it’s not beneficial to me. It’s more nightmarish than creative.
When I am in a dream I have access to a body of dream-memories. I mean, in the waking life I have this one body of memories, and in dreamland I have this other one.
I think this is related to the phenomenon of walking into a room and forgetting why you came in.
Memories are connected to the rest of your perspective. Change perspective and switch memories.
Change perspective intensely enough and you could flip all of your memories. Even your identity.
Also posted before by me; you can train to control some aspects of the dream. For me dreaming is like living different lives and movies ‘for real’. Sometimes I dream of things so realistic that months later I believe it really happened. Like someone told me about some software and where to get it; turns out this software does not exist, I dreamt it.
Control part, for instance, was dreaming about being on vacation on some island which contained zombies and, although first trying to defend and hide from them, I thought ‘it is just a dream, let’s see what happens if I get bitten’ and so I had one of them bite me. I turned into a zombie and noticed I could still think and thought maybe the others can too. They could, so now my friends and me were immortal and ready to cure the world of everything. So nightmare turned into an excellent thing.
But yes, I trained lucid dreaming since I was about 17-18, which is 30 years ago. I can just either let a dream play out or change things or wake up. I can also often make dreams continue after I wake up.
> Sometimes I dream of things so realistic that months later I believe it really happened. Like someone told me about some software and where to get it; turns out this software does not exist, I dreamt it.
Yes, that’s the exact problem I’m talking about. It’s not good. It feels like it’s bordering on delusion. I’ve met other people like this in RL. I know one woman who believes in things that only happened in her dreams. I don’t think that’s all that healthy. And of course, you’ve got an entire Reddit community devoted to these things.
Yeah, that sounds a bit over the top. I don’t take it that far and by far most dreams I have are extremely over the top or turn weird (either because of me changing things or just because they do) that they are definitely clearly dreams.
When I am in a period of intensive writing, I recall my dreams at a higher than normal rate. The dreams also feel more layered than normal dreams, although I recognize that this is not quite knowable. I will often record these dreams as part of keeping my literary diaries. My most compelling narratives are dreamlike, in that their composition borrows a structure from the mere recording of dreams. These narratives feel like dry land dreaming that, like dry land training for skating, allows me to dial in on the technical aspects of the very fluid experience that is dreaming.
This connection between dreaming and writing is of great interest to me. I am somewhat surprised that my most compelling writing was not inspired directly by any dream that I remember. The phenomenon of the one and the other are that similar. A kind of background hallucination can be intuited when writing fiction. In my experience, these hallucinations indicate that the writing has attained a degree of formal completion. I observe the characters of my story as though they were made of clay and also diminutive. Why clay? I am unsure, but I think it has to do with this clay’s yielding but inelastic quality.
I read an article once where Robert Frost took a creativity test and scored extremely low (based on seeing images in Rorschach inkblots) and remarked afterwards that creativity was not about seeing the images but in training oneself to ignore the non-essential images (paraphrasing, have never been able to find this via google - supposedly this happened while Frost was Poet Laureate.)
Also the following points seem relevant:
1. ability to remember dreams is at least partially based on being woken up during them or shortly afterwards, this is why you can generally only remember the last dream you had.
2. A good nights sleep is often described as being central to high intelligence.
3. What is the relation between high creativity and high intelligence? Which brings me back to the question of how accurate the tests are, given that there generally agreed on foundational problems with all IQ testing methods (that I'm familiar with)
> 3. What is the relation between high creativity and high intelligence?
When asked "Which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?", psychologist Donald Hebb famously replied "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?" [1]
I'm no psychologist, but I'd imagine you'd find the relation between creativity and intelligence in the same context is similarly orthoganal.
1. Meaney M. The nature of nurture: maternal effects and chromatin remodelling. In: Cacioppo JT, Berntson GG. (eds) Essays in social neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, pp. 1–14.
Dreams are weird. Last night I had an eye surgery, but they did it from the inside, by removing the top half of my skull. Then they attached it with three wing bolts. I was worried that it would fall off, because it was wobbly, and I tried to fasten the bolts but it didn't seem to work very well.
Lot of people discuss ways to improve dream recalls, or to have more lucid dreams. Is there a way to do the opposite, to stop remembering dreams or stop dreaming at all? I personally very much dislike the concept of dreaming, it feels like being forced to watch (or participate in) a movie I have no interest in. My best sleep is when I feel I was “turned off”, with no dream or at least no memory or feeling of dreaming. Just going to sleep, and wake up the morning with nothing happening in between, that’s my _dream_ night.
I never met anyone who can relate, so I guess that’s pretty uncommon.
I don't recommend it but smoking lots of high potency cannabis all day, everyday will make your dreams disappear. But they will also come back 100x more vivid upon cessation.
This is not universal. My lack of dream recall predates my consumption of cannabis. I have multiple friends who, while smoking potent cannabis daily, also have some of the most vivid dream recalls I’ve ever witnessed.
Yes, it totally is (see also my response to user dorkwood). I used to have very unpleasant dreams up until I was a teenager and now all my nights are 'turned off', like you describe. When you wake up and your dream is still present, just think about something in your real life and actively tell yourself to forget the dream.
Yeah, I don't have much of a technique to it, it feels more like the conscious decision is the most important part. It also feels like I could go back to remembering dreams if I wanted (maybe not as well as people who have been practicing the opposite for decades, but still), I just don't have any desire to. Unless there's overwhelming evidence that it'd be much better in some way I hadn't realized yet, I'm really quite happy about my nights.
I hardly ever remember dreams, maybe once per month or less. Sometimes if I eat specific foods like pizza right before bed it can trigger a potent dream, but I avoid eating stuff late at night now anyhow.
I haven't specifically tried to dream less but I've never tried to remember anything either. When I wake up, I immediately start thinking about my plans for the day and/or check HN/instagram (admittedly, a bad habit).
The pizza anecdote is a funny one :)
I can imagine a mad scientist in their lab trying different topping before forcing themselves to sleep, to identify the perfect pizza to trigger a specific dream!
Anecdotal I think but cheese dreams are a thing. Food does have an effect on dreams though. I know certain foods contain choline which causes vivid dreams in some people.
Be careful what you wish for. When you have incredibly vivid, realistic dreams, and you have good dream recall, it becomes difficult distinguishing between what actually happened in the past and what just happened in a dream.
It's a good thing dreams are really surreal then. I can separate my dreams nicely because I can't for the life of me jump 3 stores high and parkour to the edge of a glass dome while being chased.
I sometimes have dreams where I am just watching tv with some friends, or where I am programming or reading something online. And indeed, months later usually, it feels like that actually happened.
I wish I had more down to earth dreams, really. It is cool to be in a totally different reality, and sometimes when I get a little self-aware in a dream and I concentrate on figuring out whether I'm dreaming, the dream just become more realistic. Like entering a building made of a maze of stairs and actually smelling and feeling the texture of wood. But since my dreams are so disconnected from my daily reality they just fade to oblivion eventually.
Many good and interesting comments from people with high dream recall ability, but I'm more interested in the opposite.
I guess I am what the article describes as a low dream recaller. I recall a dream definitely less then once a week on average - significantly so. For me it's more like a couple of times a year or maybe once a month at best. It basically only happens when my sleep is interrupted. It has always been like that even in phases of my life where I had enough sleep.
I wonder how common that is? In the study from the article 27 out of 55 participants were low dream recallers. I assume participants were selected for dream recall ability and these numbers tell us nothing how common low recall ability really is?
"The study included 55 healthy participants (ages 19–29) with normal sleep characteristics and body mass index. Twenty-eight participants were high dream recallers (able to recall about 6 dreams per week on average), while 27 participants were low dream recallers (recalling less than one dream per week on average)."
I can't recommend enough the book "Oracle of the Night" by the neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro. He enter into the science of the dreams, and teaches how to use them as a source of creativity. Sometimes he wanders, but I think this is what creative scientists do. One of the best science books I've ever read
A really great book about dreaming and inducing lucid dreams is "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Dr. Stephen LaBerge[0]. It goes through relaxation techniques, improving dream recall, and eventually how to induce lucid dreams. It's quite a process and takes some work, but I was able to use his methods to induce lucid dreams and it's quite a powerful experience.
I recently got the book Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams: A Guide to Awakening Consciousness During Dream Sleep by Charles McPhee, but it sounded a little scary and full-on! So I haven't tried its techniques yet. Anyone here done that?
I'm sure I would've tried it in my 20s, when I was experimenting with everything e.g. once I did a mantra for 2 weeks non-stop.
I had Ann Faraday's The Dream Game, the only really good book on interpreting dreams I've seen. One of its techniques is to treat all the parts of a dream as characters, and talk with them, ask them questions, or put them in dialogue with each other.
I had a dream diary, where I'd write down every dream I remembered. After a while doing that, I'd remember them almost every night. But then I'd write them down, then wake up and realize I only dreamt writing them down. So I'd have to write them down again. I had to stop when every day I'd have to write them down 4 times! Write them down, wake up, realize I only dreamt it, write them down again, wake up, realize I'd only dreamt that, write them down yet again, wake up etc. Too much.
Also I tried sandplay, a kind of psychological therapy, which was absolutely amazing, and seems very similar to getting the parts of a dream talking. The therapist (or whatever they call themselves. Mine was a new-agey author/guru type, but there was nothing new agey about what he said in the sandplay room) has a room with a sandbox in the middle, and shelves full of hundreds of objects, toys, figurines, etc of all kinds around the walls. You walk around the room, selecting whatever object you feel drawn to, and put it in the sand. With as little thinking about it as possible. Then when you feel like stopping, stop. (I kept putting more things in, dozens, until he asked me to stop, and regrettably we only got to talk about a few of them.) Then they ask you to talk about each thing in the sand, what they mean, what one is doing next to another one etc. The answers just pour out, and it's like being able to see inside your head. I found it absolutely incredible, highly recommend! It's fun, painless, you can do it any time... and suddenly the insights/revelations usually locked away and only accessible from dreams/hallucinogens/psychological work, are freely available, gushing out.
I dictated by dreams into a microcasette for 4 weeks straight. I noped out at the end as the dreams became more lucid, almost out of body. 30 yrs later I still remember some of the dreams. I should like to try it again now that my work utilizes my creative strengths.
Dreams are a mixed bag, they can be quite positive or negative experiences, or just a tedious regurgiation of one's daily experiences that one could do without. The phrase "a deep and dreamless sleep" generally implies a good night's sleep, and excessively vivid dreaming can be rather exhausting.
Curiously there are some ways to manage dreams, here's an interesting article on researchers investigating what's apparently a form of lucid dreaming, very Inception-like work:
Interestingly I find those long Youtube 'relaxing sleep' videos to be a good way to moderate dreaming, possibly via a similar mechanism. Maybe white noise has a similar effect. One I use has waves quietly crashing on the beach, although once it resulted in a dream of walking through a thunderstorm in a forest and I'm pretty sure every time the waves crashed I'd experience a lightning-and-thunder strike which was rather alarming, complete with vivid imagery, and eventually woke me up. However, using the same video over and over again seems to result in a constant point of reference when dreaming, leading to more peaceful and less intensely random dreams. (Right after the Ukraine war broke out I started having vivid nuclear annihilation dreams, which were a bit much, and using these Youtube videos mitigated most of that)
For those who struggle with sleeping through really intense dreams, strong indica cannabis will suppress dreams for many people, but the side effects are a lot of grogginess the next morning. Maybe for PTSD it's worth the tradeoff, but for many the cost-benefit ratio will be too negative.
> For those who struggle with sleeping through really intense dreams, strong indica cannabis will suppress dreams for many people, but the side effects are a lot of grogginess the next morning.
For better or worse, there can also be a strong rebound effect with extremely vivid dreams when you stop smoking regularly.
I never remember my dreams, to the point that I am not convinced I actually have dreams. I sleep well, wake up refreshed most mornings, but have no recollection of having dreamt. Probably all the caffeine...
By now I'm pretty sure that during a large period of my life I almost didn't dream. I dreamt perhaps once a month, and usually in clusters of a few days. Nowadays, I dream very often, almost every night. I also wake up more often during the night. Unless my brain rewired significantly, I think the conclusion that I simply didn't dream back then is quite likely.
I also don't remember my dreams at all. This is the way it's supposed to be for us.
If you remember your dream it means you were woken up in the middle of it. Something is disrupting your sleep whether it's the brain itself or something else. The waking up in the middle of the night thing could be sleep apnea.
For people like us we're not suppose to remember dreams. But if we do, it means our sleep was disrupted.
From what I read, dreams are more apparent when you have poor sleep, as it either happens mostly (or at least recall ability is increased) during REM, which occurs when you're not fully asleep.
I learned to lucid dream as a teenager - it was incredible for resolving internal conflict and doing emotional work (everything in a dream is a reflection of the mind). Since then I’ve used it to solve both rock climbing problems and software problems. The basis of lucid dreaming is dream recall and a healthy skepticism about the permanence or validity of “reality.” It sounds like a difficult skill to develop but anyone who tries makes surprisingly quick progress, with quick gains in dream recall.
For resources I recommend Andrew Holocek’s books (amazing, drawing upon Tibetan Buddhist techniques) plus the app I made for lucid dreaming shapedream.co (I’ll happily give anyone free access to its tools and guides - just write me).
This was my experience too. Although it’s been 5+ years since I actively tried to lucid dream, I still have nearly the same level of dream recall and average 1-2 accidental lucid dreams per month.
The app looks wonderful! It might be the perfect excuse for me to get back into it. I’d love to maybe discuss some of your recommended reads—I’ll drop you a note.
Personally, I expanded on this to enter a dream state at will in quiet, comfortable circumstances. I find it fun to run my own mental holodeck.
I dropped regular lucid dreaming once I gained this ability and focused on improving “dreaming” at will.
Interestingly, I haven’t had any lucid dreaming since starting antipsychotic medication. Hasn’t affected entering states at will. If anything, it’s made it easier because I have much clearer cognition and the difference reality and imagination is more well-defined.
I dream every night. Been that way since I was 14. And I have bipolar disorder. Guitarist, vocalist, published photographer, writer among other things. But the creativity also bled into my technical work.
I also have Closed Eye Hallucinations, which means that at night mostly when I close my eyes the light patterns turn into physical images. For a long time they were tortured faces but I see lots of things; trees, mountains, people... So my psychiatrist thoughts on this was that the brain creativity creates these images out of patterns from the light and dark when you close your eyes.
As mentioned by the authors, the causal relationship cannot be answered by this study. But if you want to recall your dreams more frequently, I highly recommend keeping a dream journal (also mentioned in the link). In my teenage years I went from remembering an average of a dream per week to vividly remembering 3-4 dreams per night. As soon as you wake up, immediately start writing all details you remember. Whether or not this increases your creativity in the waking world, it's fun to see what your brain constructs while you're asleep.
I've written down every dream I've had for the past 10 years. Hard to say whether it's improved my creativity, but it's fun to search and see trends. Like you said, dream recall improves if you immediately record dreams upon waking.
I wrote a very crappy web app for this back in 2012: http://keepdream.me/. It emails me every morning to ask what I dreamed and records my reply. There must be better alternatives now.
Anecdotally, I've found dream recall linked to novel experiences in real life. When I expose myself to new environments or interactions I tend to recall dreams more.
On one occasion I caught a dream in the making. At some point while falling asleep my audial perception turned off and apparently it was rewired to hear internal processes, e.g. heartbeats and breathing. For a few moments it was a "textureless sound", but soon a random thought about waterfalls had crossed my mind and the sounds got texture. Imagine an overwhelming sound of waterfall modulated by heartbeats and breathing: you're aware of what's going on, but it feels so real and overwhelming, like standing under Niagara, that you're struggling to not give in to fear. When I was waking up, I caught a similar moment of half-built visual dream. I was seeing a room made of textureless cubic voxels, loosely resembling a living room layout, with a couple piles of voxels constituting armchairs, I think. However, this 3d scene was again modulated by heartbeats and breathing, so the "armchairs" were enlarging and shrinking with every heartbeat, overall resembling a fire, just made of voxels. The moment a thought with colors had crossed my mind, the voxels got texture and the room started to look indistinguishable from reality.
My wife creates illustrations fairly consistently and she has uncanny dream recall. Like, sometimes it takes 5-10 minutes for her to tell me the complete dream. She has a strong memory in general which at times is very inconvenient because she can accurately remember all my goof-ups...
This is further evidence that "dreams" aren't actually being recalled, but instead that people wake up with their brains in an inconsistent state and rationalize how their brains came to be in that state. Creativity enables us to create detailed rationalizations.
I’ve always theorized that dreams, or at least the interpretation of them, are primarily emotional states that our minds attempt to backfill with logic or narrative structure upon awakening. Even when attempting to remember the details they seem to slip away and transmutate. However the general “sense” or feeling remains.
Sadly I don't remember which medication I took, but I once took something to help with anxiety. Side effects were amnesia and hypnotic effects, if I recall correctly. I remember it was some anxiolytic.
The thing is, for like an hour or two, I was able to remember hours and hours and hours of dreams. All appeared in front of me. I could get them like a chain, first one, then another that happened in the same location (be it real or imagined), and another, and another... It was a pretty awesome, if a bit overwhelming experience.
The great thing is that now I know all the dream memories are still in there. I'm not able to remember them normally, but they are there.
I've lived with diagnosed type 2 narcolepsy[1] for 11-12 years now (half of my life, thanks Pandemrix), vivid dreams have been par for the course.
Lots of nightmare-like dreams. Looks, sounds, smells like a nightmare, but doesn't "feel" like one). Thankfully I have developed/ adapted a way to wake-up whenever.
I'd say I am semi-lucid in most of my dreams. I also have a very distinct "dreamscape" where my dreams happen. I can remember many of my dreams from years ago pretty accurately even though I don't journal them.
Yeah, I've learned to be able to wake up at will too. However, it always comes at a cost. I have to kill myself in the dream, and it always involves being hit or run over by a train.
But sometimes it doesn't work entirely as I end up waking up in another dream, which is sometimes freaky, as it's not evident to me at first that I'm in just another dream or if I am awake. But once I figure I'm still dreaming, I can always cause that train to appear again.
I too have a similar ability. But lately there's been a creature in my dreams. Every time I see it, I know I'm dreaming and I kill myself immediately. One time it managed to pin me down to stop me from killing myself. I ended up biting on some suicide capsules in the back of my jaw to die and that worked, but I won't always have that prop in the future.. It really depends on the context and the dream whether or not it makes sense for me to have that in my mouth. I can will it into existence but it HAS to make sense in the dream.
I keep running from this creature. It wants to talk to me but somehow I sense malice and that I should avoid talking to it at all costs.
How did the researchers make sure that the participants were recalling the dreams they actually had? I understand the brain scan activity, but how could they tell that the actual subjective experience of the dreams was being accurately remembered?
And those memories are like “aah I was falling” or “I hadn’t prepared for a test!” or “there was a group of people” sometimes the additional detail of “I wasn’t clothed…”
I have a lot of vivid dreams where there's some storyline going on, and within that story my mind constructs some architecture for the story to play out in. Very detailed and specific structures that I'll navigate through (that's the sensation)- hallways, rooms, environments with people and objects and where I can remember very small details, like a golden fleur-de-lys symbol on a public bathroom stall door.
I've always suspected that these dreams are somehow linked to coding and the spatial/navigational sensations I get when constructing some idea in code.
I have strong personal anecdotal evidence that dreaming and creativity are interconnected. I began dream journaling a few years back, recording descriptions of my dreams along with sketches and drawings. These sketches and notes often led to inspiration in my painting and drawing practice. Doing this also actually increased the lucidity and frequency of memorable dreams I was having in a kind of feedback loop. I have talked about this with other people who have tried dream journaling and it seems to be a common phenomenon.
Anecdotally, I absolutely believe the results here.
I went from rarely remembering my dreams to recalling 5-6 dreams per night, and regularly lucid dreaming. While I shy away from any distinct interpretive framework (e.g. Freudianism) taking the time to ask "where did this come from?" or "what is this telling me?" has given me huge insights into my own hidden fears, anxieties, and desires.
I can honestly say I'm a much happier, more well-adjusted person as a result.
I once spoke with a psychic who does dream interpretation and he was adamant that people who recall their dream and people who don't can be put in two different personality clusters (including the fact that people who recall their dream are more creative).
To his credit, he did study the scientific literature on the subject in details and might have been tipped by some preliminary research on the subject.
I started to meditate in 2007. Only 10-minute sessions. The change I noticed after a month, was that I woke up with a dream almost every day. Before starting meditation, the dreaming was a few times per year. Perhaps the meditation creates a relaxation that is helpful for dreaming?
I might say that, in vipassana, we extend our conscousness into places that are otherwise unconscious. And become comfortable being conscious there and having that place be part of our reality.
The land of dreams being one such otherwise unconscious place.
Choline will do this for you, 3 eggs (yolks) is suggested to be enough for pregnant women, lecithin, choline bitartrate, CDP Choline, and any choline mimetic like Carnitine.
I've found a couple of 000 capsules filled with lecithin 30mins before bed is best.
A none supplemental alternative is water fasting but thats something that cant be done all the time.
Choline is an chemical in cells walls, it lowers the pressure in the alveoli to facilitate the gas exchange so it can increase physical performance and endurance, its used in connections between neurons, so it keeps brain fog/baby brain at bay.
What about those of us who have had extremely minimal dream recall since we can remember? Sleeping feels like a black hole to me after the fact. Rarely do I even wake up with the slightest hint of what I was dreaming, and even when I do it slips away as I’m actively thinking about it.
The more I'm interested in my dreams and the more of them I write down the more of them I recall. But since all that writing and analyzing takes a long time, I rarely do it anymore, so I don't recall many dreams, but I'm still pretty creative.
That is your opinion and we disagree. And your last sentence is equally applicable to anything psychological content (conscious or otherwise, including simple sensing), is it not?
How is it opinion when it's logical fact. Dreams have no meaning in the same way the bible has no meaning. You assign the meaning and that can be meaningful to you personally, but the dream itself is random.
Bible or any written text has meaning. Let's say we take the most ungenerous position and consider it as willful psychological manipulation of masses. Does that deprive it of 'meaning', 'agency'?
"Logical fact".
I missed this bit in your argument. Presumably, you assert that the mind's modalities consist of a 'rational' state of consciousness and a dream state mode where the content matter is "random". It is true that the mind, unfettered by the necessity to navigate in real-time a physical reality, is no longer constrained by either physics or causality. This then results in content matter that can seem random (as narratives) but to deprive them of meaning does not follow.
I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required.
Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one
place did a correction later seem necessary.
— Mendeleev, as quoted by Inostrantzev
> By meaning I mean the brain isn't trying to communicate anything factual or relevant to you.
That does not map to my experiences with dreams and their content. But then, I -- my conscious self -- do not take an adversarial position regarding my inner Self. I benefit from reflecting on my dreams, otherwise I wouldn't waste my time. Integrating unconscious psychological content of my mind has always been a positive event, and promotes psychological health, stability, maturity, and (believe it or not) insights.
My claim is that you assign meaning without realizing it.
So my claim is all the benefits are created by your conscious self, but you perceive it to be from the dream. Similar to how religion helps people. Both are fiction.
Simple. I stare at a rock. The rock has no meaning even though I have no idea about the story behind the rock.
The burden of proof is always on the person assigning meaning to something. Why? because from a probability standpoint, no meaning is more likely. So the person claiming dreams have meaning must prove why their claim is real despite the low probability.
Why is meaning low probability? Because much more things in the universe have no meaning then have meaning.
For example, greek mythology. I know nothing of it. Yet I can make the claim that it is false and have a higher probability of being right then the person who claims greek mythology is real and has meaning and knows everything about it.
The majority of "meaning" is "found" the same way a christian "finds" meaning in the bible. It is common human behavior. By making a claim that someone has found meaning in some random thing this way, I am making a high probability claim because of the fact the behavior is so common.
I assume they meant aphantasia. As far as I know, there's no evidence that people with aphantasia cannot dream, however. Anecdotally, I believe I have aphantasia and I very rarely remember any of my dreams, but it does happen.
Interesting! Anecdotally, I have one friend who has vivid, very involved dreams that she can recall almost nightly, and she works as a professional artist who is talented and prolific across a few different areas of visual art.
I was gonna comment about this. ZMA really seems to have an impact on how vivid my dreams are. When I forget to order another bottle my dreams are far less interesting.
It's quite odd. It makes me think about how heavily our experience of life is impacted by our chemistry.
>ZMA really seems to have an impact on how vivid my dreams are.
I notice this with zinc/magnesium/calcium. Having taken it every night since adolescence, it's pretty much a requirement for good sleep. Without, REM city. Granted, less calcium and more magnesium these days.
>It's quite odd. It makes me think about how heavily our experience of life is impacted by our chemistry.
Agreed. There's probably a good argument to be had that developing a supplement dependence for sleep has likely affected the course of my life, for better or worse. Probably worse, but who knows.
As an aside, be careful with B6 supplementation; it can accumulate, causing adverse CNS effects.
Thanks for the heads up on the B6, I’ll have to do some research on that. The ZMA pills are convenient, but it wouldn’t be much more effort to just take some zinc and magnesium separately.
Yeah I like it even though the science says it’s bunk. I feel more well-rested. I tried the constituent minerals separately but the effect wasn’t the same. Either a placebo or the dosage/formulation in ZMA has a unique effect.
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Here's how to do it: as soon as you wake up, pay attention to whether you were just dreaming or not. Don't get out of bed and go to the bathroom -- if there was anything to remember from your dreams, you'll lose it by doing this. Dream memories are extremely fragile. What you need to do instead, if you remember anything at all (even just part of a dream, some fleeting image) is get out a piece of paper and write it down immediately, in as much detail as possible.
Once you make a habit of this, a curious thing happens. First, you'll remember more dreams. After a while, you likely won't have enough time in the morning to write them all down. The other thing that happens is you'll dream more vividly. There seems to be a link between how descriptive you are in your writing and how rich your dream experience becomes.