How to Remember Dreams

How to Remember Dreams:

The best way is to keep paper and pencil, or a recording device by the bed so that when you wake up in the night you can record a quick impression of what you were dreaming about.
Dream-journaling can be fun and rewarding, and I have filled pages with long descriptions of dreams.  Other times, it seems a written description can't capture the feelings and utterly outlandish happenings in the dreamworld. 

Not wanting to interrupt my sleep for long writing sessions, I found a way to incorporate mnemonic devices into my dream-recalling strategy.  I would just remember one element of part of a dream and repeat it over and over to myself.  Later, on waking up again with a new dream in my mind, I will select an element from that and add it to the first one which I can usually still recall.  In this way, I build a list of smaller elements, each of which triggers the memory of the dream that contained it.

When a dream is just beyond recall, I find the best way to remember it is to try to go into the feeling of emotion that was associated with the dream.  If I can feel that feeling from the dream again, sometimes I can remember the whole dream.

Telling dreams to another person seems to be a great way to purge the feelings of dreams, and in effect, release them.  Sometimes an image from a dream will haunt me for years, but telling another person about it seems to defuse the energy of it.

Often we dream about something that then happens in waking life.  Or we meet someone in a dream whom we then meet in waking life.  Could the ability to remember dreams be a benefit in terms of being prepared for what might come?