You can also cheat a bit in my experience by waking up maybe 45-90 mins before you normally would, then going back to sleep. The dreams you have in this period should be more vivid and easier to remember.
I'm lucky if I remember deodorant first thing in the morning. I'm usually good 5-10 minutes after waking, but before then I rarely do things like shower and sometimes won't even make coffee. I guess I can talk to folks and be really mean at first - I don't remember these outbursts, though. It gets worse with bad sleep hygiene.
Put the journal (opened to the right page) and pen right beside your bed where you can't miss it when you wake up. Write down anything that's in your head, even if it's just, "I don't remember anything." Eventually, you'll start remembering dreams vividly and be able to write them down.
Or at least this seems to work for most people. I have no idea why. Of course, it probably doesn't work for everyone. But then again, what does?
I never remember until I've been awake and moving around for a bit. :)
When I was young, I was a natural lucid dreamer and had substantial recall. I wrote tons of my dreams down. There wasn't a time I thought this was unusual until many years later in school after my recall declined.
When I reached high school, a teacher had explained the concept of lucid dreaming to a class that seemed skeptical. There was one other student aside from me that experienced them.
In response to discovering this 'oddity', I ended up joining a community to log my experiences and discuss them... there's a large variability in the kinds of dreams and the ability to induce them. I ended up meeting my last gf on that community and she never had a lucid (her dreams were mostly fragments of the prior day's events)
Mine weren't like that. Sometimes I would just fly around in environments that were similar to what I experienced in life. I would often just test to see what I could do (move objects with my mind, that sound of crap).
Oftentimes, I would just live out daily events as either a different person or myself in another time and place. A hallmark of my logs was the amount of time I experienced in each dream, when I was very young I would experience what would feel like a week in a night. There were times it felt even longer, one time in kindergarten I lived out a portion of gradeschool and woke up crying because I realized the friends I made there wouldn't be in the real world.
Today, I am an infrequent dreamer and not active in that community anymore. I can occasionally induce a short lucid dream if I have a quiet morning to myself and set an alarm to wake up a bit early. I find my recall goes up when I am teaching myself things. The recall is not related to the material I'm learning.
So yeah, there's some variability in dreaming.
I've recently started learning and practicing new music, and when I focus, fragments of old dreams just randomly appear in my head.
What makes reading articles in this style interesting? It takes a lot of time, so there's definitely an opportunity cost.
.... to you
>What makes reading articles in this style interesting?
People who are interested in the topic find detailed articles on that topic interesting.