Hi all, I'm just interested and think it might also be to anyone coming along to the Forum, to know how many dreams people here have remembered in one night.
Last night I remembered 4, which is equal to the most amount I ever record in one night after a good 8hours, which correlates to the average person experiencing 4 or 5 REM periods per night.
Does anyone vary much from this?
I'd have to go back and look through my old dream journals to make sure, but 4 dreams a night seems to be the maximum for me as well. (I feel like I may have remembered 5 in one night at some point, but if so, that's only happened once so far.)
I would say 3 or 4
My max was nine dreams, or what felt like nine dreams, in a single night, though only three of these I remembered with much detail, another three were only one-sentence-fragments. I did not, unfortunately, at the time keep track of what I'd been doing or how long I slept, I can only conjecture that this happened at some point during my longest ever streak of daily meditation.
I think comparing is a bit difficult since there isn't a standard way of deciding exactly what to consider a separate “dream”. You could demarcate by awakenings, or suspected REM boundaries, or just go by feeling, or put together anything that seemed contiguous or related to a particular scenario into what you consider a single dream.
That said, according to the way I tend to group dreams in my dream journal, the highest I remember getting in a single sleep period was something like at least 10–13 separate “dream” entries, on several occasions. Back then (it was a handful of years ago) I had gotten really obsessed with exploring and recording dreams and took notes upon every awakening that I could. Eventually, I got to the point where I was often having nights like that with totally wild dream recall. It's nothing like that today, though, as recording so much content, as awesome as it was, eventually took its toll and burned me out after a while. It got to be too much, and I had to cut back a lot on the amount of dream journaling I was doing, unfortunately.
Off the top of my head, I think I've remembered 5 or 6 fully fleshed-out, separate dreams. However, if you include those nights were I have terrible sleep, and am constantly waking up and falling back to sleep during the middle of REM, I suppose these dreams can be "broken up", to the point where I've had and remembered more. Almost like the dream is interrupted, I wake up for a minute, and slip back into the dream, or a new scene. I suppose these would count as separate, as I woke up in-between?
Relitively new to lucid dreaming here, after 3~4 months of journaling the record is 5 but this included 2 morning naps.
Hey Dan, nice idea!
It will be interesting to see whether there is a correlation with the amount of sleep cycles and dreams recalled. Although I guess that the number might get a lot higher because you can have two dreams in one REM period. I mean, maybe it should technically count as only one long one but if you can't remember things in between or can't remember when you wrote down your dream, it will be really hard to judge.
For me, on an average night, I can recall 1-3 dreams. On nights where I can sleep in, it might get up to 4 or 5. My peak was at 7 dreams and a few little dream fragments. When I'm really stressed out, it might happen that I cannot remember anything (but this doesn't happen too often, there is almost always at least some feeling/emotion/word/image after waking up). As background, I started recording my dreams about 10 years ago but had quite a few long breaks in between. I started recording them every night again about 3 years ago.