School Stops me remembering

I do have a dream journal an I’ll post what it says in a few minuites . One question first, Ive got school monday-Friday and it ALWAYS stops me remembering my dreams because the first think I think when I wake up is “SCHOOL!” DREAM FORGOTTEN :razz: does anyone have anyways of getting past this problem? Thanks :happy:. I will continue trying to LD :smile:
DJ:
(By the way if the dream seems like it’s NOT in present tense is because the things I write down is only what I remember (I only remember the description at the moment not my actions)
23/01/2010
I can’t remember much;
Talking to friend) Talking to my friend amandeep
Ravioli Mystery) Talking (I think) something to-do with ravioli

24/01/2010 (Mario Madness)
Mario theme - Maybey Sonic (I was the character)

25/01/2010 (Overheating Hairdryer)
The hairdryer was on and was over heating (- not sure if in dream or not)

Well what I do to remember my dreams when I don’t have enough time write them down is I write down what I can remember in simple one word phrases. For example your hair dryer dream, I would write the word “hair dryer” in my DJ and then write about when I get back from school. Also, you might want to write more detail about your dreams. Just my two cents.

Well, one solution would be waking up 5-10 minutes earlier, and relax because you have this time for yourself to write down your dreams. This way, your first thought in the morning can safely be “Dreams!” :smile:

I used to have the exact opposite problem: on weekends and summers, my first thought upon waking would be, “SLEEP IN A LITTLE LONGER DAY!” (shove the DJ under my pillow off to the side instead of towards me, and the dream before goes poof. And I’m not having a new dream, since I’m enjoying not having to fight my eyeballs burning with remainder sleepiness.)

On school days, because there was time pressure, the first thing I would do was pull my journal out and scribble key words and phrases as fast as I could. I’d give myself less than a minute, and I wouldn’t strain to remember more quite yet. (With practice, it gets much easier to know, even while half-asleep, the shortest way to write what will jog the most of your memory. I managed to develop a personal shorthand.) In the shower I could wash up, and try to connect what sentence fragments I could remember just writing, at the same time. Since my mom drove me, I could read what I’d written in the car and put those V-shaped editorial marks between words, adding more details that I remembered between the lines, details that I remembered while washing and dressing.

But dream recall waxed and waned, even with that routine. Unfortunately, I lost those early DJ’s, but entries started to look like these…

I would recall, then, that I was flying through my neighborhood in that dream. The leopard was in our backyard tree, and I banked to the left away from it because it looked about to attack, but I was too slow and it scratched me. I wouldn’t be able to remember any other scene.

2nd means that scene was in 2nd person, that I was watching myself. (3rd would indicate me as a DO.) So, then I would remember that I saw myself in a white cotton dress pushing a white lace-trimmed stroller. The word beach reminds me that this dream’s setting was…on the beach, duh, but also that it was a rocky beach with muddy waters and the weather was overcast. (I didn’t need to write “rocky” “cloudy” etc. to remember this, just “@ beach”.) “n” meant that it was IN the stroller, (time pressure meant that I literally wouldn’t let myself dot my i’s and cross my t’s-- well, maybe cross the t’s, but why do d@ when @ is faster than “at”?) this cream cheese doll… and I would then remember that it was somehow also a real baby. All these other memories would flow in, like the nightmare creatures that we had moved to that rocky island to escape, and the personal history of the cream cheese baby, and the sad song that dream-me was singing about it…

“, then” indicated a blank gap followed by a new REM cycle. This one in 1st person, that is from my own point of view, and I would remember that I was on my way to school. That I was trying to cook for breakfast, a cream cheese skull covered with raw meat gristle, by pressing it against the hot car window. And that it was the skull of the baby/doll in the previous dream.

Sorry, I couldn’t think of a less gristly example. :shy: But I thought this was a good example to note that, because it was a personal shorthand, I rarely confused “1st” as in “1st person” with “1st” meaning chronologically (as in, I dreamed of cooking the skull before I dreamed of pushing the stroller, but I remember the stroller-dream first upon waking so I wrote those keywords first as my memory retraced.)

See, this would be from the next day, but let’s say this morning… I get nothing. Not an image, not a word… nothing. I’m just holding my pencil over the paper for 50 seconds before I give up and start getting ready for school. Why would this happen?? I had such good dream recall yesterday! But ‘oh, well,’ y’know.

In the shower, though, I realize that I’m feeling really bad. Angry. I guess I dreamed something bad and that offended me. Why would that be? What would that be? I can’t remember… until I wonder, Who would that be? It’s not a question that makes sense, because I ask it while I’m not really fully awake and rational-- but it’s the question I need to wonder, to remember.

There was this old classmate of mine, who was a real jerk and a bully to everyone else in the class, but he would smile and try to make conversation whenever I came by (this was In Waking Life, or in shorthand IWL.) My friends IWL said it was obvious that he was hitting on me, and I would feel nauseous.

Once I remember that the dream “starred” him, I remember that what he did in the dream was ask to play a hand-clapping game while I held up a red-and-yellow pinwheel on a stick. I got angry because I thought the friendliness was a trick to break my pinwheel-- because in the dream, he’d crushed and torn everybody else’s pinwheel. This dream was set in a dead-end brick passageway or “smoking pocket” on campus.

So, I keep that dream in mind and fill my DJ in on the drive to school.

This was logged as if I would remember a lot, but I didn’t. I hop into the shower, and they become just… words. That happened sometimes, too. Still does.

… So, that’s how it was. My family rarely ever had time for sit-down breakfasts, but when we did, we would exchange what we remembered of our dreams the night before. Maybe that would help? My sister liked to remember her dreams and listen to other people’s to get ideas for stories and poems, and I liked to interpret for a casual care for psychological health. My mom joined in for a bit of both, but also because dreams were weird or cool or funny.

I had this problem too for a while, since I work out every morning. My solution was to start waking up earlier, writing them, then going back to sleep for like 10 minutes before working out.

You may think this very strange, but I have the word “Dream” on a poster. I pin one to my bedroom ceiling, one to the wall to my left, and one to the wall to my right. Then, when I open my eyes, the first thing is see, is the word DREAM, which reminds me.

It works for me. :content: