Don’t have/remember dreams?

Why is that it is so rare that I have/remember dreams? Some people say that everyone night you have a dream, it’s just a matter if you remember it or not. For simplicity sake, let’s ignore this. If I don’t remember it the moment I woke up, then I didn’t have it. I rarely have dreams. Sometimes I only have like 1 dream per month. Although from like December to Mid March, I had no dreams. And it was frustrating because I like having dreams. It is an interesting experience. And it’s not like there was a sudden change that made me not have dreams. Things are just going on as usual. Only April, thrice and in May once, I had dreams. Does anybody know how to intentionally get dreams without taking drugs?

My mum told me that being mindful of it will make you remember your dreams more often. Being mindful as in, before you fall asleep, you consciously think to yourself 'when I wake up, i will remember what i dreamed about'. Dunno if it works because I never cared about trying it, guess ill try tonight and see.

Take some benadryl an hour or two before sleep. As your acetylcholine rebounds, you will dream.

Most of these are techniques that I tried while attempting to lucid dream but they had the primary effect of making my dreams more frequent/memorable. 1. Go to bed as early as you can so that you can get lots of sleep, your REM (dreamy) sleep increases as the night goes on. When I get 8 hours of sleep I hardly remember anything, when I get 10 hours of sleep I remember tons of dreams (the majority occur in those last 2 hours). 2. Keep a dream journal, write down every detail you can remember as soon as you wake up (try to recall them before opening your eyes). Make sure you add a spot in your journal for the next morning's entry before you go to bed. This, plus planning to try to remember your dreams before you open your eyes will prime your brain to remember them. 3. Try to visualize something while falling asleep, like yourself walking through the woods or something. Try to imagine each of your senses (sound of the wind, smell of the decaying leaves, etc.). Rarely if ever will I dream specifically about the thing I visualized but it seems to get my brain in that mode. 4. If you wake up in the middle of the night, write down your dream right then; you will probably forget it by morning. Noticing how many times you wake up in the middle of the night is another outcome of this. Normally you would wake up several times, fall back asleep, and forget you ever woke up, but once you have the mentality of "do X when you wake up" you will notice and remember. I do not recommend intentionally waking yourself up with an alarm, waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle will be miserable and unproductive (especially long-term). It's better to rely on your body waking up naturally at the end of a cycle. If you find that this doesn't happen often, try chugging water before you go to bed, then you will wake up to have to pee at some point. When I do all these, I have lots of dreams that I can remember and they are often vivid/weird (which is better than a lucid dream IMO). If I stop doing these, I stop remembering dreams, so it's not permanent.