Do you want to learn how to remember your dreams better? These five proven dream recall techniques will help you wake up with clear and vivid memories instead of forgetting everything.
Have you ever woken up knowing you had a dream, but couldn’t remember a single detail? You’re not alone — but with a few simple techniques, you can start remembering your dreams much more often.
1. Set the Intention Before Sleep
It’s almost as simple as it sounds. Just tell yourself before sleeping: “I will remember my dreams.” Say it a few times in your head or even out loud. You can write it down too.
This works surprisingly well. It’s the same idea behind a lucid dreaming method called MILD — you’re basically reminding your brain what to do, like when you tell yourself to remember something important the next day. Your mind listens more than you think, especially right before falling asleep.
2. Don’t Move When You Wake Up
When you wake up, don’t move. Just stay still with your eyes closed.
Moving even a little can make the dream disappear. It shifts your focus and pulls you out of that half-dreamy state where the memory still exists. If you stay still, it’s much easier to catch the details before they fade.
Usually just catching one detail of the dream can open you a gateway to start remembering more and more and putting the pieces of memory together. Stay still and keep trying to remember the story and the details for a few minutes. You are done when you can’t memorize more.
3. Write It Down Instantly
The memory of your dreams fades fast if you don’t think about them or write them down soon after waking up. But there’s a trick I use — where you can get out of bed, and you don’t need to do full dream journaling right away.
Instead, I like to stay in bed for a moment, thinking about the dreams I remember, and then just write down a few keywords. Later, when I sit down with my coffee to write the full entry, those keywords help me recall the dream much more clearly.
4. Wake Up More Often
As everyone has probably experienced, waking up straight from a dream gives you a much better chance to remember it. If you wake up more often, you simply have more chances to save the dream in your memory.
That said, this probably shouldn’t be your go-to technique all the time, since it messes with your sleep. Waking up many times during the night isn’t great for your natural sleep cycle and might affect your overall sleep quality.
5. Keep Writing
This is the real secret to remembering your dreams every night. Once you’ve built the habit of writing down your dreams each morning, your brain starts treating them as important — and as long as you keep doing it, you’ll naturally start remembering your dreams every night.
From my experience, once you can write your dreams down every morning and keep doing it, you can forget almost all of the above. The dream recall is already built, and you’ll remember your dreams each morning.
Likely Dreaming | Exploring Dreams & Sleep 