Dreams Unlimited with Rosemary Watts, Dream Educator

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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 R.E.M. 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. Then begin to work with, play with, and explore one or more of these dreams during this two week time period. Whether on your own, with a Dream Buddy, in a Dream Group, or with a Dream Professional.

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.
~	Telling you something you don't want to know.
*	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.