Dreamstuff

Keeping dreams and dream progression.
From start to finish.

key:
If you/r - start of topic
Personally - some insight(not too much) into my experience with the topic

If you want to get more detailed dreams/want to start getting better at remembering them,
you need to write down absolutely any single detail you can remember, even if those details involve
only remembering the feeling of: if it was good or bad, what it might have been about, what it made you feel,
and any other disconnected details.

If you want more awareness in your dreams you could attempt to try to influence the subject of the dream itself
while still awake by thinking about what you want to dream about, or doing actions moments before sleeping like
operating any kind of mechanical interface like a faucet or a light switch, or even opening a door and looking into a mirror.
in the beginning of your dream keeping it is likely these things will not operate as they do in the real world and may tip you off
that you may be sleeping. You can also do the really meta thing and literally outright ask yourself while awake "am I dreaming?"
and then this may occur in the dream.

If your dream was really fucking blurry and lacked nothing of any substance, chances are it was probably just that
level of detail to begin with and isn't a recall issue. Recall and detail have nothing to do with each other.
This can be proven by remember the dream all the way through from the start of the dream to when you wake in bed.
inability to recall should not inhibit the actual memory of the detail in the dream, or at least I don't think it should.
I'm not entirely certain what impacts level of detail in a dream other than lucidity, I would like to believe recalling my dreams
so many times and thinking about their details and what I felt within the dream also improves my ability to simulate things within my dream
such as physics and the human senses.

Personally I like having as plausible simulation as possible,
and sometimes this inhibits my own ability to enact upon dreams in certain ways,
or at the worst, makes it super difficult for me to do anything too fantastical without it being previously defined by the dream as being possible.
Mostly because I enjoy controlling only myself within the dream and not the entire course of the dream.

If you ever have recurring nightmares and want to fix that to progress to other things in dreaming,
you will want to have semi-lucidity, enough so that when you recognize something that might trigger a nightmare you can act upon it.
The act which you do though is to make yourself extremely paranoid while focusing intently on the object of your fear.
This will induce a nightmare, likely of the one you usually have.
Do this until you managed to:
1:fight back somehow
2:befriend it

Personally, and to help you understand it a bit better,
My nightmare triggers were usually the hallway and the darkened rooms at either end and a mirror.
nightmare involved the figure of my nightmare at the end of the hallway, paralyzing me and making it hard to move, it seemed to be a gravity thing or a paralysis thing.
Of which I have no idea, but eventually I started dragging myself toward the figure, which was the little boy from the grudge, a movie I hadn't even seen.
eventually I got to it and snatched some gravity control mechanism from its hands and it turned into a cute witch girl who I then proceeded to defend against a horde of angry mobs.
After a few more similar silly dreams like this I befriended all the spoops that appeared in those nightmares and I was back to normal dreaming.

WARNING:
It is likely that if you half ass it, such as "holy shit spooky spoop room of dark, eh fuck it" and go about your dream like normal, the dream may become a vivid nightmare of fucked up proportion.
This likely wont have much effect on DESPAIR induced dreams caused by traumatic real life experiences.
though I haven't been able to work on that kind of dream as of yet thankfully, so I cant test it.

If you've gotten over this then cool, it's time once again to focus on the progress while awake, after you wake up and try to remember your dreams,
try to link real life events you were involved in to certain events that happened in a dream.
It can even be really minor real life events, even a few sentences you read or a few tiny actions you took or observed in a day can be related to something in your dream.
Sometimes the relative event can be pretty different to what you actually dream about but still be related to it in basic concept
After you do this, try to think about what these events mean to you.

Personally, I used to go rape mode in my dreams whenever I had even a tiny bit of a sexual thought.
After documenting this a bit I started being in more control of my urges in dreams.
this used to interrupt some pretty good dreams too, glad it's under control.

If you start getting more aware of your dreams and yourself in dreams you can take a few approaches to it.

1. Do what I did and treat dreams as an important tool for introspection/self learning and an entertainment device,

I mostly focus on self-control and not dream control to make sure I have as much unique content as possible in my dreams.
useful for both watching entire stories unfold while being part of them but also useful in the way that they can be used for introspection and learning about yourself.
Possibly giving you the ability to change yourself on a basic level depending on how you interpret certain events from your dreams,
this may or may not affect your insecurities/confidence, and the way you think about certain things.
If you are powerless and get held down by a specific person in a dream it might be that they intimidate you and you are insecure about interacting with them.
If you rape everything around you in a dream, you can decide to like it or dislike it, this might be a sign you have no self control depending on what you think of it.
It's up to you to interpret what these things would actually mean to you though if you had dreamt about them

2. Continuously practice lucid dreaming and dream control and have a fantasyland you can attempt to control every aspect of.
I have not done this myself yet but I am clearly able to do this stuff if I try hard enough in a non excited state.
I'm gonna have to suggest focusing on this after taking my path

3. I don't really know any other approach to dreaming past what I
chose to do and the second option which seems to be the popular choice of most people.
Maybe you can find some completely different usage of dreaming on your own.

If you read all this you may have noticed that I basically let the dream form itself instead of trying to control any aspect of it other than myself.
Dreams form themselves on a very basic principle, your feelings and expectations. It doesn't even matter how slight the feeling is, it can have a major impact on
the dream from then on. it can be the difference between getting stabbed or crushed by an unfavorable bunch of different things and ruin a good dream, but that can be fun sometimes.
I usually get shot or stabbed or crushed in the gut if I have to go to the bathroom, the dream then takes the feeling of me needing to
go to the bathroom and then applies an amplified feeling of this in the dream to me as pain at the exact moment I get skewered, crushed, or shot.
So even real life feelings can influence what you feel and what can happen in a dream.

Some things that may happen:

[Bodily wakeup call] - Bladder/Large intestine:"hey dude here's a gun wound/skewering for you full of awful pain, now wake up and go take a piss/shit"
This is only one example of what a bodily wakeup call could be.

[Slow wakeup] - slow wakeup is when you are conscious but coming out of a dream slowly, you may have your eyes open but you may have lingering
effects from a dream and you may still be partially under the influence of sleep paralysis,
This can cause different things to happen, the most different of which would have to be hallucinations of sight, sound, and feeling.
I once was stabbed in a dream when I had to urinate IRL, the feeling was as usual amplified into pain within the dream and I was coming out of the dream slowly.
This only caused the amplified feeling to become completely unbearably, ridiculously, excruciatingly painful until I finally fully woke up and it reverted to just feeling like I need to piss
I also woke up to a giant bald man's head projected onto the ceiling laughing crazily and it was spoopy as heck.

[GET ME THE FUCK OUT] - Panicking is very possible and you may attempt to force yourself awake in some cases,
I would heavily suggest you do not force yourself awake AND panic at the same time, this can cause problems IRL, you may make weird as fuck noises
while attempting to wake up and may choke on your own drool. Luckily my mom woke me up before I choked on my couched from a stupid dream.
If you get frightened in a dream that isn't all that scary, just remember to not panic despite your fear, and force yourself awake calmly as possible without trying to thrash around in your sleep.

[Nightmare] - Nightmares(dreams) are FUN, do not fear FUN, FUN things can be interesting too! Even if they are scary.
[Nightmare] - Nightmares(the spooky evil(?) thing?) I have no experience with those I think.

Other random observations -
Lucid dreaming? Close your eyes in the dream, I bet half the landscape disappears once you open them again or doesn't appear at all depending on how long you closed them.

I can't remember some shit so that's all for now.
.

[EDIT]

I remembered some shit last night thanks to a dream reminding me of it.

Sometimes dreams are entered into long term memory even if you can't actively recall them
They are harder to recall due to each dream being pretty unique and having no real world associated mnemonic in most cases.
These hard to recall dreams will not be forgotten but you will forgot having had them which will make it unlikely for you to ever recall having them even if you have memory of the events in the dream.

This is very rare, but you may have dreams that remind you of older dreams through various different means, I've only had this happen twice and through two different means but there are more ways to trigger dream recall through dreaming than this I'm sure.

The first time this happened was when I had a dream I was going through surgery for something specific, this reminded me of another dream of the same thing happening, this secondary dream currently happening was essentially a continuation of a much much older dream.

This can be used as a trigger to gain lucidity but I would not waste a dream like this on such a silly thing given the option.

The second dream which happened last night was of me and an old acquaintance on a bus heading somewhere on a road trip,
I asked her to tell the story of when we went urban exploring and found a beautiful field with a research building in the middle of it,
There were some other details but the point is that I recalled the very old dream by having a dream that contained something I could associate with it.

This has a lot of implications (without putting any thought into it at first) about dreams.
It is probable that you retain memories of dreams as long as you do real memories
which also means many of the dream settings you've dreamt up could still be revisited even if you don't actively recall them for continuation of older dreams.

It is rare but it may be induceable, I wouldn't know how yet at this point.