I haven’t been rememebering my dreams much lately, so since my schedule is a little less crazy now I decided to work on this a bit. I couldn’t find my old dream journal (which is too bad, but I didn’t dig through everything in my office yet either) so I found a journal which only had one page used in it and requisitioned that. I also tried to remember to repeat the “I will remember my dreams” mantra before going to sleep.
This produced some limited success remembering dreams. Then yesterday, I found the Lucid Dreaming book on WikiBooks. I’ve very occasionally been lucid in a dream, and usually wake up shortly after realizing I am.
I only read through the recall section, feeling that I should work on recalling first since there wasn’t much point in exploring the lucid aspect if I wasn’t going to remember it.
Beyond making sure I had my dream journal and dedicated nice pen (adding a bit of ritual) and went to bed earlier than I normally do (as much because of sleep deprivation as to abet my dream recall) I didn’t do anything special.
Over the course of the night I must have had a dozen very short dreams. More like snippets of dreams. I didn’t actually end up wrighting anything down, but they were all over the place. I was alone in a fair normal desert landscape (where I was lucid and tried to fly but woke up instead), or with people in a restaurant of some sort, fighting someone, waiting in a gigantic movie theatre with some girl I didn’t recognize, and so on.
I’m not 100% sure what triggered such a flood of recalled dreams. Probably a combination of several things.
Another thing they did recommend is reading about dreaming (and lucid dreaming in particular) as you go to bed, which I didn’t do, my reading was earlier in the evening, I was reading a book about kabbalah and mathematics – which was fairly trippy in its own right, so maybe that helped.
Anyhow, I’m planning to go to aikido tonight, which should wear me out quite a bit since I haven’t been in a while. A decent fraction of my dreams involve aikido, so it I’m very curious to see what will happen tonight. I’m also going to make an effort to write any dreams I have down, even if it’s in the middle of the night.
Another thing I’m curious to try is some of the various herbal incense blends and teas that are supposed to make dreams more vivid.
I only remember the freaky dreams!
Like this one I told you today about the triska envelope. It was a manila envelope, too. 
I don’t know how everything ‘triska’ had sent me could fit in the envelope though. And I don’t know why there were so many pencils… and each had a clue written on it instead of the pencil brand.
So, yeah… when are you coming over?
Tierra del Fuego… mmm. US$900… owwww.
I find that if I’ve overdone the wine a little I have the craziest dreams. Not bad, precisely, but memorable, I always retain them the next day. It may just be that I’m not sleeping as deeply, (with the discomfort from my bladder and the slight dehydration) but who knows. Red wine, always red wine. Zin, typically.
Hmm, interesting. I can’t recall any correlation for me with alcohol and dreams, but then unless I’m making an effort I don’t often recall my dreams.
Mush ‘speriment with drinkin’ an’ take gud notes. Hic.