on keeping dreams
The world I encounter when I’m asleep is one that’s both intimately familiar and entirely alien to me. One minute I’m swimming in a rooftop pool that’s actually in my neighbour’s backyard, and the next my mom is there until she’s my dad, and a dog in a fairy costume is staring at me from under a bush.
It all makes complete sense while I’m still dreaming, but the second I wake up, I lose access to the illogical sense my subconscious grants me. And, where my mind can typically rely on logic and facts to cover holes in a patchy memory, remembering anything from a dream can be like trying to hold dry sand in my fist.
Regardless, I love my dreams. And I’ve always loved to talk about them, even as eyes glaze over while my listeners wait politely for me to finish stringing together the incomprehensible.
It was a natural progression, then, for me to move from talking about my dreams to capturing them in ways I could refer back to when I was awake.
what's a dream?
Carl Jung said dreams are “shaped energy” where inchoate emotions and thoughts are released by the subconscious and turned into stories. Freud (being Freud) described them as an expression of repressed conflicts or desires. I agree with neither of them.
For me, dreams are an opportunity for subconscious exploration; a voyage into the subliminal.
Modern neurologists and psychologists speculate dreaming is nothing more than an unconscious reflection of our internal anxieties, fears, desires, hopes and fantasies, or it could be simply the brain’s way of sorting through and clearing data. Whatever they are, I’m interested to keep track of mine, and I do so by keeping a dream journal.
how to keep a dream journal
Diarising your dreams is a simple two-step process:
- Wake up.
- Immediately record what went on in your head while you slept.
Step one is fairly straightforward (if not always easy).
Step two is achievable, but time-sensitive. Dreams are fragile, and they have to be captured within the first 90-odd seconds of waking up — lest they disappear behind the thoughts that cloud your mind from the onset of daily consciousness.
Lauri Loewenberg, author of Dream On It: Unlock Your Dreams, Change Your Life, recommends keeping your body in the exact same position that you were in when you woke up as you grasp the details of a dream, as this will help sharpen your memory.
To ensure maximum dream retention, I keep any writing tools I need for dream journaling within waking reach. With my eyes half-closed, I’ll scribble down everything I remember into a book of barely comprehensible script. If writing is beyond my waking capabilities, or if I wake from a dream in the night, I’ll voice-record whispers about what I dreamed.
I’ve found that adding drawings is useful when I can’t put certain events into words. Sometimes I’ll record myself humming a tune I heard in the dream, and it’ll help me remember what occurred while the song was playing.
what to record
Like professional dream researchers, I write down my observations of characters, events, objects, places, how I felt, and what my role was. Unlike professional dream researchers, however, my records may be significantly harder to read or understand. (Half-asleep people aren’t the most articulate folks.)
Over time, I try to connect the dots and pick out patterns. Do the same people reappear in my dreams? Do animals feature often? What are my in-dream emotions — happy, scared, sad, or some other phantom feeling? What carries over to my dreams from real life, and what seems bound entirely in my dreamscape?
why dream journal?
There may not be a consensus as to what meaning or relevance dreams have to real life, but there are myriad good reasons to keep a dream diary. Personally, I find that peeking into one’s own subconscious is a fascinating exercise. You might, too.
1. remember dreams more vividly
One of the most memorable and moving dreams I’ve ever had was of a friend who had passed many years before. In my dream, we had a precious second chance to be with each other, and it was real, and it was vivid and it was emotional. And I wanted to remember it.
There’s nothing more frustrating than waking up from a wondrous, intricate dream without being able to remember the details or retell it coherently.
Experts suggest that when we consciously decide to journal about our dreams, we train our subconscious to retain the information. When the conscious and subconscious minds work together toward a common goal (which is to remember the dream), we’re more likely to succeed.
2. learn to control dreams
When I was younger, I’d have a recurring dream of snakes coming for me. I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer not to have snakes after me, so I started researching how to control dreams at the age of 14.
I stumbled upon “lucid dreaming”: a dream hack that involves “waking up” inside your dream and manipulating it. There are a few ways to get into a lucid dreaming state — and, at 21, I even attended a course to delve deeper into the various methods to lucid dream — but most of them have one attribute in common: getting you to record your dreams. The better one remembers their dreams, the more likely it is they’ll enter a lucid dreaming state.
3. get better at creative problem-solving
They say we should sleep on a problem, right? That way, a solution might magically appear the next morning.
Scientists call this “dream incubation” — the idea that if you focus on a problem before you go to sleep, your dreams may help you find a solution.
Sewing machine inventor Elias Howe apparently solved the problem of the machine’s needle when he dreamed of warriors carrying spears with holes in the tips. The chemist August Kekulé dreamt of a snake taking its tail in its mouth and woke up realising that the structure of benzene was a closed ring.
How does this happen?
Scientists say that when we’re asleep, there’s great activity in the visual areas of the sleeping brain, which allows it to visualise solutions more readily than when we’re awake. Also, the brain areas that keep us thinking logically are much less active during REM sleep, which is when most dreaming happens.
To harness this power, wait for a moment before sleeping to decide what problem or issue you want to address in your dreams. Upon waking, write your dream down to encourage your subconscious to save it to your permanent memory. This will enable your brain to connect different ideas and create new ones. The answer may come upon waking, or you may need to jot down successive journal entries to find clues to solving the problem.
on keeping dreaming
If you’re interested in keeping your own dream journal, here’s one way to start:
Write the next day's date in your journal so that you remind your subconscious to remember your dreams. And then, before you hit the sheets, tell yourself you want to both dream and remember that dream.
Happy dreaming!