How to Remember Dreams: 8 Practical Steps for Better Dream Recall

If you want to know how to remember your dreams, you might be feeling frustrated. Everything seems to come down to the same four or five tips:

• Go to bed at the same time
• Intend to remember your dreams
• Don’t jump out of bed in the morning
• Keep a dream journal

Don’t get me wrong. Some of those tips are useful.

But after keeping dream journals for many years and applying the same kinds of deliberate recall strategies I use in my work as a memory trainer, I’ve found that having a specific retrieval strategy makes a much bigger difference for me.

That’s what I’m going to share with you here. I’ve been recording and working with my own dream memories since at least 2008.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with journaling, intention, association and the Memory Palace technique to see what helps me capture more of what I can recall after waking.

Although I won’t bore you with excerpts from my voluminous dream diaries and journals, I will share the practical steps that have helped me most.

And no, I never leap out of bed just to write down a dream. Instead, I use memory techniques to hold onto key images and ideas until I’m ready to record them.

If you’d like to experiment with improving your own dream recall, let’s get started.

How To Remember Dreams In 8 Steps

Many of the steps outlined below may already be familiar to you.

I’ve found that each is important and hope you find the nuances I bring useful.

For best results with all of the techniques for recalling dreams, let’s start with what I have found to be the most important step of them all.

Step One: Commit To 90 Days

Ninety days is my practical rule for giving a memory-training experiment a fair chance.

I’m not claiming that something magical happens in your brain on day 90. What matters is giving yourself enough repeated experience to learn the procedure, notice where you forget to use it and gradually make the process more automatic.

Books such as 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman and Atomic Habits by James Clear provide some of the science behind the 90-day principle. They are both worth reading when engaging in many kinds of outcome-based activities.

Richard Wiseman also explores sleep and dreaming in Night School.

Now, following a 90-day plan doesn’t mean you need to follow a rigid routine every night.

But consistency makes it much easier to evaluate what you’re doing.

From a memory-training perspective, the useful takeaway is to approach recall as a form of deliberate practice: perform the steps, observe what happens and adjust.

Step Two: Read About Dreaming

The more familiar you become with the subject of dreaming, the more vocabulary you have for noticing what happens in your own experience.

This is a form of metacognition. In other words, you’re not only trying to remember a dream. You’re also paying attention to how you attempt to remember it.

That distinction matters in memory training. For years, I’ve encouraged students of memory techniques to pay attention to the difference between information simply popping into awareness and information being deliberately reconstructed through cues and associations.

You can notice the same distinction with dreams. Sometimes a scene appears immediately. Sometimes you remember only a person, location, emotion, object or fragment of a conversation. Instead of dismissing the fragment, you can treat it as a retrieval cue.

This is also a useful opportunity to learn more about concepts such as implicit memory and the many different ways information can become available to awareness without assuming that every forgotten detail is still stored somewhere waiting to be recovered. My own interest in dreams has led me to read widely about them over the years.

But for the purposes of this exercise, I recommend keeping a clear boundary between remembering a dream and making claims about what the dream supposedly means.

My specialty is in the use of memory techniques, so that’s where I keep the focus: noticing, associating, retaining and recording what I can actually remember.

Step Three: Use The Power Of Intention

In Dreams 1-2-3, J.M. Debord suggests repeating “I will remember my dreams” almost like a mantra or prayer.

You don’t have to make the practice elaborate. I treat intention much more simply: as a cue that reminds me what I want to pay attention to when I wake up.

It’s also important not to turn intention into a guarantee.

For example, some dream books make claims suggesting that dream memories are never truly lost and are simply waiting to be recovered. I don’t think we need claims like that.

If you cannot remember something, the most accurate thing to say is that you cannot currently recall it.

That attitude removes a lot of unnecessary pressure. After all, most of an ordinary day is forgotten too. Your goal is not perfect recall. Your goal is to become more skillful at noticing and retaining whatever fragments are available.

Step Four: Prepare Your Dream Journal In Advance

Back in 2008, my real breakthroughs in dream recall started when I not only kept a journal, but prepared it in a particular way.

First, I decorated my dream journals.

There was nothing magical about doing that. It simply made the journal distinctive and helped turn it into an obvious cue for the activity I wanted to remember.

Then, each night, I wrote the date of the following morning.

As I did so, I briefly reminded myself that I wanted to notice whatever I could recall when I woke up. Finally, I kept the dream journal somewhere visible in the bedroom and placed a dedicated pen on top of it. You don’t have to copy my setup exactly.

The memory principle is simply to reduce friction and create obvious environmental cues.

As someone who has spent years teaching memory techniques, I’ve found that small details like where you put an object, when you perform a step and what cue you associate with it can matter enormously in whether you remember to use a technique at the right moment.

Step Five: Write Something Down No Matter What

No doubt about it. It can feel frustrating to go through the preceding steps and still not remember a dream.

It happens to me sometimes too.

I decided years ago that I would write something anyway. Some mornings I simply wrote: No dreams remembered.

Other mornings, I wrote down whatever fragment was available: a person, an object, a location, a color, a sentence or even a vague impression.

The point is not that writing somehow forces a missing memory back into existence. The point is that you continue practicing the recall-and-record sequence.

That gives you many more opportunities to observe what kinds of cues seem useful.

This is where my personal 90-day rule comes in again. I sometimes call it “Metivier’s Razor,” but it’s best understood as a coaching principle rather than a scientific law: Give a memory technique enough consistent practice to judge it fairly. For dream recall, I use 90 days.

Step Six: Draw

When writing down your dreams, you don’t have to use words all the time. Sometimes you may remember a shape, layout, object, movement or scene that is awkward to describe verbally. You don’t have to be an artist. A crude sketch can work as a retrieval cue just as well as a polished drawing. In memory training, distinctive cues often matter more than beautiful ones.

Step Seven: Use A Memory Palace

This is where my approach to dream recall differs most from the standard advice. You don’t necessarily have to reach for a journal the instant you become aware of a dream.

Instead, I use a Memory Palace to hold onto important fragments until I’m ready to write them down.

The Memory Palace is one of the central techniques I’ve practiced, researched and taught for years through the Magnetic Memory Method.

For dream recall, I use an unusually simple version based on the room I’m already sleeping in. As soon as I become aware that I’ve been dreaming, I mentally use the four corners and walls of the room as Memory Palace stations.

Then I associate a striking image from the dream with one of those locations.

If another scene or idea is available, I place another exaggerated association at the next location. This gives me a short sequence of location-based retrieval cues I can mentally revisit later. If you’ve never used this technique before, I teach the fundamentals of creating and using Memory Palaces in my free memory course: The important point is that you don’t need a complicated Memory Palace for this exercise.

You can start with the room you’re already in.

Here’s an example based on one of my own dreams:

I was showing my wife a giant dinosaur statue in the middle of a street in the city where I grew up in Kamloops. I explained that there used to be an even bigger statue and then we watched the Flintstones in a hotel room.

When I awoke, I mentally placed the dinosaur on one of the walls and imagined Fred Flintstone sliding down its tail. The combination was exaggerated and easy for me to revisit.

Later, that image helped cue the larger sequence of what I remembered from the dream. This is exactly the same basic principle I use when teaching memory techniques for waking information: create a distinctive association and connect it with a location you already know.

Step Eight: Reflect On Your Dreams

Once you write down your dreams, spend a little time reviewing what you actually remembered. I’m not talking about psychologically interpreting them or claiming that a particular image has a hidden universal meaning. I’m talking about something much simpler:

Categorize what you recalled so you become more familiar with the kinds of details that tend to appear in your own dream memories.

For example, was the dream:

• Filled with familiar people and references?
• Abstract?
• Filled with symbols, objects or unusual shapes?
• Structured like a clear narrative?
• A mixture of apparently unrelated episodes?
• Emotionally intense?
• Set in a familiar location?
• Connected with people or places from a particular period of your life?

By asking questions like these repeatedly, I’ve noticed recurring themes and patterns in my own dream journals over the years. I try not to turn those observations into mystical or pseudoscientific conclusions.

For me, their value is much more straightforward.

They give me material for reflective thinking while also giving me another opportunity to practice noticing, associating and recalling information.

Note: I believe that dream recall is about the process, not the product. Although I enjoy reading old dream journals from time to time, I’ve also thrown many of them away.

What has mattered more to me is the act of capturing fleeting information and experimenting with the same fundamental memory principles I use elsewhere: attention, association, location and recall.

Why Dream Recall Is So Fulfilling

For me, remembering dreams makes my recollection of a period of life feel richer.

A dream journal can preserve details that would otherwise be easy to forget, and rereading an old entry can sometimes remind me of the surrounding period in which I wrote it.

But I don’t think we need to make bigger claims than that. I’m not suggesting that remembering dreams treats psychological problems, clears negative memories or produces a particular change in the brain.

My interest is memory. After years of practicing and teaching mnemonic techniques, dream recall remains one of the more unusual ways I personally enjoy exercising the basic skills of noticing, creating associations and retrieving information from cues.

And the most interesting part is that you can test the process for yourself. Prepare a journal. Set your intention.

Notice the first fragment that comes to mind. Turn that fragment into a strong association.

And if you want to take the technique further, use a simple Memory Palace to hold onto several dream fragments before recording them.

So, what do you say? Are you ready to start remembering more dreams?

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below and enjoy experimenting with a new application of your memory skills.