Dream Recall and Deep Sleep

I cannot remember my dreams. This has been the case my entire life. Recently I have become interested in Lucid Dreaming, and would like to experience it myself. However, whenever I sleep, it would appear that i go from awake to deep sleep without being able to detect that I'm falling asleep. As far as I'm concerned, when I go to bed at night, I wake up a few minutes later, yet is actually 7:00 a.m. (The time I get up). So my question is this:

Does anyone know any techniques, methods, etc. that can help my dream recall or ensure a more complete sleep cycle (not just deep sleep)?

If you want to recall your dreams, you have to wake up while in REM sleep. In normal humans, living a normal schedule, that would be around 12:00, 03:00, 05:00, and 06:00. If you never recall your dreams that either means that you are not maintaining any significant REM sleep, or your sleeping through it into a lighter stage of sleep. On average, humans get around 25% REM sleep in a night, though it varies with age.

It might be a placebo effect, but maybe you should invest in a dreamcatcher.

If it works, sweet, if not, then its still a pretty thing to add to a room.

I have a dreamcatcher with a face on it. Before I go to bed, I face the eyes of it towards me. I've been having crazy vivid dreams lately.

Yep.

I wish I had some advice to give you, but I don't know how to consciously remember dreams. I just can't resist but to comment on my personal experiences with dreaming.

When it comes to dream recall, I am practically plagued with it. I wake up every morning able to vividly remember multiple dreams from the previous night. If I'm lucky, I'll even be able to recall details of the dream later in the day. (But, this isn't exactly a lucky thing if I had a bad dream, after all... who wants to have vivid images of their nightmares stuck in their mind?)

One more interesting dream-phenomena I've been experiencing is the repetition and advancement of the same dream. For the past year or so I've been having a dream in the same imaginary setting where each time the setting is improved. At first, I just figured it was some weird mind trick... like, maybe it was only within the later dreams where I imagined that I had the dream before. The whole... incorrect dream memory (if that makes any sense). As if it was in the dream that I dreamed the experience before. But then I told friends about the dream, and when I had it again (with the expected improvements) I told them about it again. They remembered me previously discussing it, so it's not as though I dreamed the initial dream.

Blah. I think I said "dream" or any variation thereof like 20 times.

If you want to just dream the easiest thing to do is mess with your sleeping patterns. Set your alarm clock for 3 or 4 hours before you would get up. Make sure you wake up all the way and at least get out of bed a while, then go back to sleep. I do it sometimes around 3:30 in the AM. Often you will begin to dream before you re-enter deep sleep, you were probably in REM when you woke up, and the body will go right back to it. If you are sleeping lightly you have better chances of being aware.

Also you are probably dreaming actually, just not recalling it. I would also put a paper and pen by the bed so you can jot down notes on the dreams you wake up from in the middle of the night.

But that's what I would do if I was simply trying to force dreams to happen. Just try to be aware when you are falling asleep, try to notice what your mind and imagination are doing without intervening.

The trick is to sleep before you sleep. When you're tired and go to sleep, most of the times you will not remember the dream because you need to shut down and rest. Taking a few hours nap of deep sleep will help you wake up while you are sleeping at night. The other thing to do is to wake up right after the dream and write it down with all of the details, you will most likely forget it if you don't write it down. I also do this when meditating and other things that require you to have your eyes closed.
You have to force yourself to wake up while in the dream when important things happen. If you notice in the dream that someone tells you something important, you have to create an alarm that basically tells you "I have the info that I need, I must wake up" and actually get up and write it. If you get to have vivid dreams you have to create a test or a clue for you to know that you are not dreaming and you are actually writing the stuff down. Some times I write the stuff down in the dream it self and when I wake up is when I realize what I did.

Teach you mind to be conscious.

Old advice that started my exploration. I would recommend daily reality checks. During your waking period have a mental check: 1) look at your watch and remember the time, when you look back ask yourself if your awake or dreaming, whem dreaming the time will be different 95% of the time, you will realize your dreaming and become lucid.

My best was touching every doorway I walked through when awake, and asking myself was I awake. When dreaming you will continue this repetitive process, your hand 90 % of the time will go through the wall when dreaming, when you ask yourself if awake you become lucid.

Set a alarm about four AM, wake up read or think about lucid dreaming and go back to sleep, you should become lucid.

Does anyone know any techniques, methods, etc. that can help my dream recall or ensure a more complete sleep cycle (not just deep sleep)?

It is unlikely that completeness of the sleep cycle is an issue. You can search sleep cycle. Its period is about 90-120 minutes. The kind of dreams that people remember (the stuff with plots, settings, characters, ...) is typical of rapid eye movement sleep.

It is probably true that if you set an alarm to wake you every 90-120 minutes or so, then you would remember more dreams. You would also be more likely to have lucid dreams, to report astral projection, abduction by aliens, visits by shadow people, sleep paralysis, etc.

Many people simply keep a dream journal to improve dream recall. "Simply" may involve some additional effort, like keeping a sound recorder near the bed in case a dream wakes you up, and taking a few minutes in the morning, every morning, to remember the dreams that you had.

You don't remember dreams because your long term memory is fried when you sleep. Nevertheless, with a little bit of "free association" in the morning (let your thoughts wander, in other words), you will catch onto the knack of grabbing hold of fragments.

Telling you how to remember your dreams is no different than telling you how to remember the name of your third grade teacher. On the one hand, it is impossible to tell you how to do that. On the other hand, the information sought is in your skull somewhere, and if you let it, it will find its way into consciousness. Some of it, anyway.

Whether or not the increased attention to dreams cashes out in lucidity or not, time will tell.

BTW, the specific attainment of being aware of falling asleep

i go from awake to deep sleep without being able to detect that I'm falling asleep.

is also learnable. Richard Feynman, for example, did it as an undergraduate class project. In his case, that much attention to sleep spontaneously resolved into both lucidity and some "control" of dreams as well, at least for a time.

Hope that that is helpful to you.