How to remember and record dreams

I forgot to put this up before. Will do so starting.... now.

I will explain by going through, chronologically, how I have recorded dreams in the past and present.

In the beginning, I recorded dreams "the hard way". This meant whenever I had a dream that I found important, immediately upon waking up (at 0200 am, 0400 am, or whenever), I would force myself awake and write down the dream. I kept a sheet of paper (on a clipboard) and a pen near my bed at all times, and I would use this with a small keychain flashlight to write down my dream on the spot. For particularly long dreams, I would play through the dream in my mind before opening my eyes.

From my experience, opening your eyes is the first major step that dispels a lot of dream memory. That's because it changes your focus from your "mind's eye" vision of the dream that just happened onto the "physical eye" vision of the room around you. Seeing your room awakens associated memories of things you have to do tomorrow, books you read, etc, etc. All of this displaces the dream memory that is still very tentative and vulnerable to being wiped out by the stronger physical memory.

Typically, due to the way memories form, your memory of physical events is stronger and more reliable than dream memory. You can have a dream and forget it by the next day, but you will still remember what you did last night, whether that be read a book, watch a movie, etc. I'm not a neurologist so I couldn't tell you why it's like this, I can just say that in my personal experience, that's how life works.

So anyway, the reason I call this the hard way (getting up to write down the dream) is because it interrupts your sleep. If you're having prophetic dreams 2-4 days a week, that's a lot of nights of interrupted sleep. It's worse when you have multiple prophetic dreams in the same night. Sometimes I've had 3 prophetic dreams in a single night (I have at least 2 of these nights recorded). I know very well how disruptive this can be, but in my life it was doubtless worth it.

Back when I first started, I thought it would be like this for the rest of my life. I thought I would always have to get up and write down the dreams, but I valued them more than I valued sleep, so the decision was easy (even if the execution of that decision wasn't always easy).

However, over time, perhaps a year or so, I got better and better at remembering dreams. There came a point in time (I did not record when) when I got so good that I could remember dreams simply by replaying them in my head after waking up. Now, whenever I wake up after having a prophetic dream, what I will do is replay the dream in my head several times until I can firmly and easily remember every detail. Then I go back to sleep and I write it up the following morning when I get up. I can do this very reliably for short to medium length dreams.

For very long dreams, I still have to write them down to capture all of the myriad details. For these dreams, I replay them in my head several times and then get up and type the dream out on my computer immediately after waking. For all other dreams, I can wait until the next morning to write them down.

I believe that I am able to do this because I have trained my mind to remember dreams by repetition. I have honestly had dreams where I am writing down details from the dream while STILL IN THE DREAM. That's because of ruthless, disciplined repetition. I have gotten up in the night literally hundreds of times to write down dreams like this, so it's only natural that I have gotten better at simply remembering them.

At the same time though, I think I have discovered a strong technique for dream memory: mental repetition. I don't know if other people could simply copy my technique and get the same results, because I'm not selling a book or anything about this. I know what worked for me, and it may or may not work for others. Either way, I hope this information is useful to others in the course of studying and meditating on prophetic dreams.

So in the end, this has been great for me because I get the high value of prophetic dreams without having the difficult task of writing them down at 0300 am when I'd rather be asleep. Now I get both!

And..... done!