WAYS
TO REMEMBER YOUR DREAMS
By Rosemary Watts |
| |
|
| * |
Give yourself pre-sleep suggestions
to recall your dreams. It can be something as simple as, "I honor my
dreams and easily recall them upon waking."
|
| ~ |
Have a pen and paper by your bed to record your dreams
immediately upon waking. It's helpful to have a pen light or small flashlight.
If you prefer, have a tape recorder by your bed, but try to speak clearly
into the microphone and then transcribe the tape the next day in order
to clearly capture the dream images. Utilize whatever form of recording
device you will use consistently that won't require too much additional
time and energy.
|
| * |
Write immediately upon waking any story,
impressions, feelings, symbols, or themes. Also date and title the dream.
It is very important to record your experiences in the PRESENT TENSE.
|
| ~ |
Pay attention to your own individual style of dreaming,
which is usually a combination of visual (including story line, vivid
details, colors, and other specific visual descriptions), auditory (including
sounds, sound affects, music, and waking world sounds), and kinesthetic
(including feelings, impressions, sensory information like smell, taste,
and body sensations, and specific body impressions like a kink in your
neck or a stabbing pain in your back).
|
| * |
Don't get out of bed, begin the day's
activities, or begin thinking about the day ahead. First, record any
images from your dreams. |
| ~ |
Do not depend on your memory. If you think you'll remember
it and write it down later, more often than not the dream will be gone
by the time you try to recall it.
|
| * |
Wake up in the middle of the night or
on 1 1/2 hour intervals or at the 7 1/2 hour mark of sleep in order
to capture the dream as you come out of the REM stage. You might drink
a glass of water just before bed, and then when you need to get up in
the middle of the night, catch your dream images before getting out
of bed. It has been suggested that a glass of orange juice before bed
heightens dream recall.
|
| ~ |
Train yourself to wake up just before the alarm goes off
or the music comes on. This enables the sleeping cycle to occur naturally
so that the dream images aren't jolted out of your conscious awareness.
|
| * |
Naps count too. Any and all dream images,
snippets or full blown epics, are very important. |
| ~ |
Alcohol, drugs (prescription or recreational), and little
sleep will inhibit the dreaming cycle. Be aware of this and know that
these factors will influence your ability to recall your dreams.
|
| * |
Try to recall your dreams on a daily
basis. The more regular you become about writing your dreams down, the
more you will remember. Quality is more important than quantity. One
dream explored in depth is more valuable than a month's worth of dreams
that remain untouched and invisible in your journal.
|
| ~ |
A crucial advantage of keeping a journal is that it gives
you the opportunity to review a series of dreams. |
|
|
TRICKS:
|
| * |
Review the previous night's dreams before
falling asleep. This gives a message to your subconscious that you are
honoring the dream images. |
| ~ |
Return to your dreaming position in the bed. This will
prompt dream images to surface in your conscious mind. |
| * |
Record the last scene first. This brings
up more details from that last dream and often leads to remembering
previous dreams from the same night. |
| ~ |
If you still have trouble recalling your dreams, change
your sleep pattern, the position of your bed, or the room you sleep
in. Some shift in your surroundings or habits will help trigger recalling
your dreams. This accounts for "active dreaming" on vacations.
|
| * |
Remember, the most valuable book on
dreams is the one that you write yourself: your personal dream journal.
Writing dreams down reinforces your ability to remember them and activates
feelings, associations, memories, and insights that might have been
neglected.
|
| ~ |
A two-week period is optimal for heightening recall and
obtaining a series of dreams that can be viewed as a whole. The appeal
of this concentrated period of attention is that it's not intimidating
or time consuming, yet the formal two-week structure usually brings
fruitful results, even for people who have never before kept a journal
or focused on remembering their dreams. |
|
OBSTACLES
TO DREAM RECALL:
Beliefs that a dream is ... |
| * |
Fragmentary and therefore useless. |
| ~ |
Too trivial or just a repeat of daily events. |
| * |
Illogical, nonsensical, or confusing. |
| ~ |
Bewildering, morally repulsive, or terrifying. |
| * |
Inadequate in some way; for example,
lacking an appealing or coherent story line. |
| ~ |
If you occasionally dismiss your dreams as worthless for
any of these reasons, you increase the likelihood of having difficulty
remembering dreams. It's important to value every dream as a
potential source for insight and change.
|
| * |
If you find yourself tempted to minimize
the importance of a particular dream or of your dreams in general, keep
in mind that even the tiniest, confusing, mundane dream fragment can
have profound meaning. |
HOW
TO REMEMBER YOUR DREAMS
By Rosemary Watts, © 1994 |
One of the myths
about dreaming is that only certain people remember their dreams. Starting
in the 1950's, sleep laboratories discovered and began studying the
stages of sleep where dreams occur. This stage, called R.E.M. for Rapid
or Random Eye Movement, dispelled the myth about who dreams. Scientists
proved that everyone dreams every night. Since then, it has been the
focus of dreamworkers to educate and assist people in remembering their
dreams.
So how can we remember our dreams? Intention is the biggest factor.
By giving simple pre-sleep suggestions, such as, "I honor my dreams
and easily recall them upon waking," you can program into your subconscious
the desire and goal of remembering any dream. Have a pen and paper by
the bed to record your dreams immediately. If you prefer, use a tape
recorder. Immediately upon waking write any story, images, sounds, impressions,
feelings, symbols or themes. Record the dream in present time, as if
the dream is happening now. Also date and title the dream for later
reference. Dream fragments are important to record as well. Don't get
out of bed and begin the day's activities until you have recorded the
dream(s). If you wait until after you shower, have breakfast or go to
work, most of the dream, if not all, will have disappeared by the time
you go to record it. Do not depend on your memory.
Try to recall your dreams on a daily basis. The more regular you become
about writing dreams down, the more you will remember. Train yourself
to wake up just before the alarm. In this way, you won't have your dream
interrupted by the buzzer or music, and you can wake up more slowly
retaining more of the dream. You might drink a glass of water before
bed, and when you need to get up in the middle of the night, catch your
dream images.
Some "tricks" to aid recall for more stubborn memories include reviewing
the previous night's dream (or the last remembered dream) before falling
asleep. This gives a message to your subconscious that you are honoring
the dream images, thereby eliciting more dream memory. Another trick
is to return to your dreaming position -- we each have a particular
body position that we turn to when entering R.E.M. This movement often
will prompt the dream images to filter back to conscious awareness.
If you still have trouble recalling your dreams, change your sleep pattern,
the position of your bed or the room you sleep in. Some shift in your
surrounding or habits will help trigger your memory of dreams.
Dreams do mean something and paying attention to them is helpful
for almost every area of our waking lives. Utilizing the wisdom, problem
solving tools, suggestions and insights from our dreams can aid in understanding
and improving the quality of waking life. But before this can happen,
we must employ basic dream recall techniques to begin the learning process.
(Original printing: The Women's Voice newspaper, Volume
III, Issue XII, St. Louis, MO, August 1994.)
|
