Even though MyBleam.com began at the beginning of this month, I have actually been systematically recording my dreams since July of this year, and unsystematically much longer than that. Over this period, I’ve noticed that the amount of dream content I can recall is directly proportional to both:
- The amount of sleep that I obtained that particular night…
- …and if the time I fell asleep is consistent with previous nights.
Clearly then, a very simple technique to increase dream recall is to obtain an adequate amount of sleep, and on a regular basis! The more sleep you get, the more sleep cycles will complete with normal time intervals. This is pretty commonly known; for instance, it is discussed at Dreamviews, and emphasized in books by Stephen LaBerge, and many others… Still, there is no substitute for direct experience in understanding dream phenomena. I also think that the consistency of the time of sleeping could be important in terms of matching biorhythms to sleep cycles; I’ll have to do more research on this point at a later time.
In any case, last night I did NOT get enough sleep, NOR did I fall asleep at a time consistent with previous nights. Therefore, I recalled very little dream material! Surprise!
In the one dream I did remember, I was coding HTML in a futuristic setting. Suddenly, everything stopped working, and I could not discover why. At this point “spiritual aliens” appeared, took what they wanted from my project, and then left me befuddled…
[Creative commons photo credit at flikr: Alien by Kieling]
