So many people forget their dreams in the first few minutes after waking up, but there are some tricks to keeping then if you would like to try it. It takes some practice, but it really works. Anyway, it did for me.

First of all, at night just before you go to sleep, tell yourself that you want to remember your dream. Try to think about that as you are drifting off.
Then, just as you start to wake up. Do not open your eyes or move too much. Start immediatly thinking about the dream you just (hopefully) had. Run it back through you mind, try hard not to let anything else creep in and break your concentration. Get up slowly, and gradually start your daily routine, but make sure you have completely thought threw your dream before getting all caught up inthe daily challenges of life.

Now, there is a down side to this. When you start remembering your dreams, you will find yourself wondering all the stinking time, "why in the hell did I dream that???" You start dwelling on your dreams and find they interfer with thinking about the things you need to do and take care of. I tried this for several weeks, and honestly, it was about to drive me crazy. So I shut it off. Just reverse the process above. When you go to bed tell your self you will promptly forget your dreams upon waking. If you do dream, get up and get moving as soon as you wake up and force the dream out of your mind by thinking of all the other things you have to do today.

It sounds pretty weird, but it really works out that way. At least it is a good mental exercise to see if you can gain a bit of control your your brain.

I don' remember my dreams at all, unless I wake up in the middle of the night - but I'll forge them by the morning. And that is not because I have a bad memory (which I do sometimes), as my friends complained on some issues. Sometimes weird things happen. I have a good friend Karri, hi's a Finish exchange student, we play Ultimate Frisbee together and never quarrel. One morning I remembered having a dream that he did something extremely mean to me, bu I had no idea as o what that was. More than that - I actually did not know if that was a dream, or not. So the next day when I saw him in the hallway and had an extremely angry and gloomy look put on (just in case), he smiled as always, said hi, and passed on. I heard, many of my friends ave had similar dream problems. have you?

P. S. Maybe unrelated, but do you believe that dream interpretation can be used to predict future? I do not, but there's something to it. Your dreams are based on the groups of neurons in your cerebral cortex excited during the day when they "cool down" and let images out during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. That's when you see images. So, the dreams definitely have a lot to do with our past. But do they really predict (or even shape?) our future?

The dreams which you remember are just unrelated events that have recently effected you. The ones you remember are when you wake up during them. When you sleep, your brain process everything which happened that day. Thats why people say "Sleep on it" and it works. Your brain uses everything you've learnt and your experiences that day to improve your desiscion. So the more you sleep, in theory the smarter you'd be. But then again, more sleep less time to do stuff.

Your suggesting that we force dreams out of ourselfs. You say it works, and i'm not disagreeing. But I prefer having a dream whereby it happens on a random bases. You always appercaite that dream more then a forced one I would imagine.

I think there are sometimes when I don't even dream at all. It's just a blackness all night long. When I actually do dream, I usually remember it mostly, or at least a faint picture from it or something. But it's really boring when you don't dream. I think I get more tired when I have nights without dreams. I'm not even sure if it's normal to not dream.

Well, I am an insomniac but I've been getting like 2 or 3 hours of sleep lately and I don't remember blackness, just vague dreams. The thing that happens to is I forget dreams just the second I open my eyes, I just remember I had them, some colors here and there, nothing much. Though if I do somehow manage to remember them, they make me upset the entire day long. So I guess the side-effect you have mentioned might definitely be one.

I am having a week of vacations and nothing much to do, so I guess I'll have the time to try these out. XD

I think I've replied to a similar topic on how to remember your dreams. You could practice and train yourself into remembering a dream, but there are also certain factors for you to be able to do so.

here's my post on a different thread: click here

It helps if you don't have excess movements when you're asleep and you don't jump out or jerk once you wake up. Allowing your body and mind to slowly go into the transition of sleeping to waking state helps you to remember your dreams more. I don't know if sleep inducing products (like incense candles or sticks and drinking milk or pills) would help though. And of course, it helps for you to write down all the details of the dream that you're able to remember once you wake up. I do a lot of those, just in case I want to asses myself (I do a lot of dream interpretation) or I want to recall certain stuff (trying to prove if deja vu can happen in dreams lol don't mind me )

I don't know about dreams predicting the future, but I have had a few strange experiences with dreams I've had. Once I had a dream about this lady I really didn't know all that well, we had talked a few times at our local growers market. In my dream I went to her house for a visit. Some months later, they actually invited me to come over, and I have to say, the simularities with her real house and my dream house were uncanny. She had never spoken a word to me about what her house looked like, there was no way I could of known anything at all about her house, but yet, there is was, just like I saw it in my dream.

Another weird one was one day I saw a good friend of ours drive up the road past our house. We hadn't talked to him in a few months. That night I had a dream about him, and a few weeks later when I talked to his girlfriend, I was shocked at how clearly, (though in an abstract way) my dream was about what was currently going on in his life.

Experiences like these make me really curious about dreams and other things, like mental telepathy. The only logical way I can really explain knowing these things is if I picked it up from my friends subconcious minds. I suppose there could be other explainations, but that does seem the most likely.

I had heard this once before, and I was surprised to find it actually worked.

I don't know how it works because your supposed to try anbd carry the dream on, but in actual fact the dream only happens within the 1st 10 seconds of the dream. Your dream may seem to last ages, but its just your mind playing tricks, when you go into a deep sleep, about 20-30 seconds after you fall asleep, then the dream ends, and your mind is just blank until you awake.

I dunno how it works, but it does.

Thanks.

I can actually only remember dreams if I was waken up in the middle of it. I don't even remember Blackness. It is like the night didn't happen, yet I am perfectly rested.