How to Remember Your Dreams
Date: 8/28/2026 | By: Dr. Dana Harron
When things are happening in your subconscious that you aren’t fully aware of, dreams can be a tremendously rich avenue towards understanding what’s happening. I do not believe that you need to remember your dreams in order for them to facilitate your healing – just as the things that trip us up can operate outside of our awareness, so can our healing. But remembering them lets you work with them on a conscious level so that you can intentionally use these vital messages from the subconscious to improve your daily life.
Intention
Just thinking about wanting to remember your dreams as you go to sleep at night can make a difference. You might even consider reminding yourself out loud that you want to remember them, which increases the number of senses involved.
Engagement
If you want to remember your dreams more, engage thoroughly with the ones that you already have. Write them down, make art about them, or talk about them with your therapist or dream group. The more you attention you give to your dream life, the richer and more rewarding it is likely to become.
When you write dreams down, it can be helpful to use the first person and talk as though the dream were happening in real time: “I walk into the hallway” instead of “I walked into the hallway.” This sets the frame such that when you re-connect with them in your waking life, you are more likely to step into it as if it were happening now, which makes it more likely that you will re-experience the dream instead of only remembering it. Try to write down your inner experience as well; the thoughts and feelings that occur to you in the dream can be just as valuable as the narrative of events.
Consistency
Like with most new habits, the important thing is to build engaging with dreams into your life in a way that can be sustainable. Engaging deeply with dreams for a month is great, but if you want these important messages to come more frequently and be remembered more easily it’s important to be consistent.
Pegwords
While you do want to elaborate on your dreams as much as you are able in the morning, in the middle of the night, writing down an entire dream can wake you up and disrupt your sleep. Instead, I suggest that clients try to write down three to five “pegwords” that capture the essence of the dream. If I had a dream I was looking for my keys in a cabana in Spain with Ernest Hemingway, I might write “keys. Hemingway.” And get back to sleep.
Avoiding Dream-Suppressing Substances
In particular, marijuana and THC derivatives tend to suppress dreams. These substances alter sleep architecture so that a person does not get as much REM sleep as they otherwise would. Some allergy and sleep medications can give you difficulty remembering dreams as well, although the mechanism is different. Whereas THC compounds can make it so that you dream less, medications such as these have anticholinergic properties that can make you less likely to remember things.
Alarms
The reality is, dreams are easier to remember when we do not go through our typical slow waking cycle. I absolutely do not recommend this on any sort of ongoing basis – good sleep hygiene is much more important to living well than remembering your dreams.
But if you have a big dream workshop coming up, or a really pressing question about things that are clearly a little outside of your awareness, setting an alarm can help. I recommend just doing an hour or two before you usually get up; that way you are likely to be in a REM cycle (the sleep state that produces dreams) but probably won’t harm your sleep too much overall.
You don’t have to explore them alone. At Monarch Wellness & Psychotherapy, our therapists offer warm, integrative, trauma-responsive support tailored to your individual needs. If you’re ready to explore what may be happening beneath the surface, we invite you to schedule a free 20-minute consultation and see if working together feels like the right fit.
