7 ms·

This is sub-anecdotal, I know - but I recently after many years of "don't mess with my head" took mirtazapine for mild-depression/over-awareness-of-the-actual-s

• pmoriarty 7y ago
  "I fell asleep much faster and woke up (refreshed) remembering all manner of weird clear dreams. Previously was one of those people who for the last decade couldn't recall a single dream (and had trouble nodding off)." Just another anecdote, but I've found many techniques that have worked for me to greatly enhance my dream recall that don't require any drugs. The first technique is just to get interested in dreams, read up about them, study techniques of dream recall, dream analysis, the science of sleep/dreams, etc. The second is to have an intention to remember your dreams when you wake up, and consciously focus on that intention before you go to sleep. Third, when going to sleep try to remember your day in reverse, from the moment you laid down in bed back through your day to when you got up that morning. The theory is that you're kind of priming your mind to think back to your dream when you wake. Next, as soon as you wake up write even the smallest little thing that you remember about your dreams down on paper. Alternatively, you can record your dream in a voice recorder, which is what I do as I find it much faster and more convenient than writing. Something else that I've noticed is that if I move my body when I wake, it can adversely affect dream recall, so I try to stay as still and as much as possible maintain the exact body position that I woke up in while I record the dream. Also, when I have a really long dream to record, I found that I would often forget the end of dream while writing it down, as writing all the details down would take too long and by the time I got half-way through I'd forget. So I suggest writing down some key words and images first, and then go back and fill in the details afterwards. The words and images you've written down will help you remember. Then, what's helped me is to go over my dreams and try to make sense of them, look for patterns in them, and try to see the connection between them and my waking life. I've found they have a lot of meaning and aren't just "random neuronal noise" that some people make them out to be. Using these techniques and others, and just taking dreams seriously and being interested in them led me to go from remembering maybe one dream every three months to remembering three long dreams every night, and filled up hundreds of pages in my dream journal with records of dreams and dream analysis. The downside is that doing this takes a lot of time, so I stopped after a while, and lost interest in dreams, and went back to very rarely remembering my dreams.
  • maroonblazer 7y ago
    Here's what I've found useful in helping to remember dreams: Set an alarm to wake yourself 2-3 hours earlier than you normally do, then fall back to sleep. Upon waking at my usual hour I'm usually able to recall quite vividly whatever dream(s) I had over that 2-ish hour period.
  • KennyCason 7y ago
    This sounds very identical to my process as well. I obsess about recalling as many of my dreams as I can when I wake up. I have a similar experience all the way down to trying to not move my body or so anything that can disrupt my dream recall, including avoiding actively thinking about my dream (similar to a meditative state). The only difference is that I don’t record anything after. I find that just thinking about it a few times after I wake up is enough for my satisfaction. Dreams are very powerful tools for thought that I think society could benefit more from.