Dreaming is a mere side-effect when you use sleeping for escapism. Not being able to dream is usually just lack of effective sleep time / substance consumption / lack of dream memory. Try keeping a dream journal and sleeping in late. You will have longer periods of light (REM / dream) sleep in the morning after a good night of rest.

Once you have accumulated some of your dreams in a journal, you will develop a feeling for your dreamscapes and signs. Especially if you don't have a very exciting waking life, you will find more and more of your dream memories bleed into your personal bias of experience, used for decision making, judging, creating and other everyday mind stuff.

The process is self-boosting, as your dream life increasingly influences your waking life, hence your dreams will become more important. On the bright side of this you will be blessed with indescribable adventures during your sleep, while one the other side nightmares can take a greater toll on your wellbeing. This is where lucid dreaming techniques and attitudes come in handy.

Last night I had a really surreal dream. I was falling down a dark stone cascade full of terracotta armies. When I landed on the ground great fear came over me. All the naked statues began moving and turned into humans of flesh and bones. Some were mating others were scuffling or cowering on the ground. Over our heads two great spirit formed into a guy with long blonde hair and a hellish fantasy-style black armor with horns on the shoulders and a wavy cape. Though his frightening appearance he turned out to be a man of culture, indulging in philosophy and music.

A few years ago I happened upon a strange trick for vivid dreams. It can help with lucid dreaming too, in that it makes it easier to implement the usual tricks.
Get some strong melatonin tablets, the sort of dose you can really feel. Then get some nicotine patches and cut them down to a dose tolerable to you. Just take the melatonin and sleep with the patch on.
Your dreams will be unusually vivid for some reason. It really feels like you've had an interesting experience overnight.

>>24358
Thanks for the advice. I have heard of dream journals, but never got around to writing one. I should probably get some paper ready besides my bed, often I can only remember fragments minutes after waking up.

I did not know sleeping in late helps. I actually belived the opposite and went to bed earlier the last few weeks. Thanks for clearing this up.

>>24362
The last "vivid" dream I had also occured after too much caffeine and me forcing myself to sleep - so I guess there is a correlation there. Not so keen on taking pills though.

>>24362
Nicotine, Caffeine and Alcohol increase the extend of deep sleep periods in early sleep cycles right after going to bed until midnight. This is compensated by extended dream sleep periods later in the night, giving you more time to develop rememberable dreams.

>>24363
Going to bed early helps too, for example if you can't afford to sleep in. It's just important to get much sleep, better too much than too little for dreaming.

Dream journaling is essential. Sure, it's a bit of a hassle every time, but there is no more effective way to train your dream memory. Even if you only remember fragments of a dream, write them down or record them on tape! It can be useful to have pencil and paper ready, so you can make quick notes, when you wake up from a cool dream at night. I have managed to recall up to six dreams in the morning, but most of the time you forget at least half of them entirely and only remember specific scenes from others.

>>24364
Hmm. I think nicotine -- when present during sleep -- actually does something more bizarre than that. You won't notice any marked effect from smoking before bed, only from wearing patches to sleep. I guess because the half life of nicotine is very short. I haven't really looked into it in any detail, but here is something I found:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16782142

>>24362
Silene Capensis works great for me, its a root that you consume twice a day that gives you more vivid dreams.

>>24358
>>24355
thanks for posting 3d
hhahaha that one you hid behind the spoiler was hilarious, who'd have expected someone to post 3d here? whatta card!

>>24367
I wish I could dream 2D stuff all the time. Anyways, fixed it for you.

>>24364
What anon said, a dream journal is your best, most useful tool to have access to your dream world, dream retention, almost a necessity to train lucid dreaming as well. I've been keeping a dream journal on and off for many years now and recently I'm back at it again. I usually would write and draw my dreams but it can get time consuming when you're remembering 3 or 4 dreams each night. That's the reason I always end up quitting it. Now I'm back at it, I can't stop for long, it's like losing half of my life when I can't remember my dreams anymore.

One useful technique I don't see people mentioning often is organizing your dream if you can't pull yourself to actually wake up fully to write the dream down. What you want to do is tell yourself the dream you just had, organizing the pieces you remember, doing your best to transfer all that dream data over to an organized thought remembering everything over and over again. Even if you wake up hours later or decide to write down later instead of right when you wake up you'll remember a lot, most often all of it. Try to tell yourself the dream over and over again, don't let your mind float away from it, you may lose it forever if you do. After you tell yourself the same dream 3 or 4x you'll have memorized enought to actually write it down later.

Another thing I don't see many people mentioning are dream triggers. You know when you look at something that instantly makes you remember a dream you had? Use that, try to come up with a system. If you're trying to remember a dream, try to trigger yourself by lookig at pictures of animals, plants, people, places, try to remember what you did the day before or the stuff you watched or how you felt that week. You would be surprised how these triggers are not that difficult to find. Just today I was trying to remember a dream and by touching my nose against a window and breathing on the glass, a whole dream scene triggered for me. It's fascinating and satisfying at the same time.

I had a wonderful dream last night. It was 1992 again, a gentle breeze was blowing through the open window, softly moving the curtains as it came. The pale light of a bright morning shone through the entire room and everything was quiet. I was sitting on a checkered carpet in front of the old TV set, switching through the channels. Between the ones with just static I find a station airing an old episode of Doraemon. As I sit there, watching a friendly blue cat teaching a kid to pilot a giant robot for the first time, the world seems to be captured in absolute bliss and perfection.

>>27144
That's a reposeful imagery. I would assume that you are from a different part of the world than I am but I have to say it's quite a pleasant surprise to hear that someone in another side of the world shared a similar childhood as I do. Makes it feel a little less lonely.

>>27144
This is one of the most beautiful things I've read on an imageboard.