Is your dream recall limited to fragments that fade away as you hurry off into the business and traffic of the day? Relax. Here are some fun and easy ways to renew and refresh your relationship with your dreams.
1. Set an intention for the night. Before sleep, write down an intention for the hours of dream and twilight that lie ahead. This can be a travel plan (“I would like to go to Hawaii” or “I would like to visit my girlfriend/boyfriend”). It might be a specific request for guidance (“I want to know what will happen if I change my job”). It could be a more general setting of direction (“I ask for healing” or “I open myself to my creative source”). You might simply say, “I want to have fun in my dreams and remember.”
Make sure your intention has some juice. Don’t make dream recall one more chore to fit in with all the others.
If you like, you can make a little ritual of dream incubation, a simple version of what ancient seekers did when they traveled to temples of dream healing, like those of Asklepios, in hopes of a night encounter with a sacred guide. You can take a special bath or shower, play a recording of the sounds of nature or running water, and meditate for a while on an object or picture that relates to your intention. You might want to avoid eating heavily or drinking alcohol within a couple of hours of sleep. You could get yourself a little mugwort pillow — in folk tradition, mugwort is an excellent dream bringer — and place it under or near your regular pillow.
2. Be ready to receive. Having set your intention, make sure you have the means to honor it. Keep pen and paper (or a voice recorder) next to your bed so you are ready to record when you wake up. Record something whenever you wake up, even if it’s at 3 AM. If you have to go to the bathroom, take your notebook with you and practice doing two things at once. Sometimes the dreams we most need to hear come visiting at rather antisocial hours, from the viewpoint of the little, everyday mind.
3. Be kind to fragments. Don’t give up on fragments from your night dreams. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you may find you pull back more of the previously forgotten dream. The odd word or phrase left over from a dream may be an intriguing clue, if you are willing to do a little detective work.
Suppose you wake with nothing more than the sense of a certain color. It could be interesting to notice that today is a Red Day, or a Green Day, to dress accordingly, to allow the energy of that color to travel with you, and to meditate on the qualities of red or green and see what life memories that evokes.
4. Still no dream recall? No worries. If you don’t remember a dream when you first wake up, laze in bed for a few minutes and see if something comes back. Wiggle around in the bed. Sometimes returning to the body posture we were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what we were dreaming when we were in that position.
If you still don’t have a dream, write something down anyway: whatever is in your awareness, including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams: “I’m listening. Talk to me.”
You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have a sense of clarity and direction that is a legacy of the night. We solve problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process that went on in our dreaming minds.
5. Remember, you don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream symbols if we are willing to pay attention. Keep a lookout for the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception in the course of the day, and ask whether there could be a message there. Sometimes it’s in your face, as happened to a woman I know who was mourning the end of a romance but had to laugh when she noticed that the bumper sticker on the red convertible in front of her said, “I use ex-lovers as speed bumps.”
When we make it our game to pay attention to coincidence and symbolic pop-ups in everyday life, we oil the dream gates so they let more through from the night. This happened to a woman who came to a series of evening dream classes I was leading. She told us: “I’ve come to break a dream drought.” She thought she knew why she was missing her dreams. “I’m scared my dreams are telling me that I’m going to lose my job.”
I suggested that, since she’d had no recent dreams, she might want to let the world speak to her in the manner of a dream by carrying a question with her into the night and receiving the first unusual thing that happened as a personal response from the universe. She wrote down the question “Is my job okay?”
We were eager to hear her report at the next class. She told us she got her message right away. “Although I know the neighborhood well, I found myself driving the wrong way down a one-way street — and didn’t notice until a big truck threatened to push me off the road. I guess I’d better start looking for a new job.”
After this incident, she started recalling dreams again and had several to share in the new class. She had dreamed she was in Washington, D.C., at a conference on transportation. As we explored this dream, she revealed that her current work consisted mostly of arranging conferences, and that she had a friend in Washington. “But I know nothing about transportation — except maybe how to drive the wrong way down a one-way street.”
We need to do something with our dreams. By the end of that class, the dreamer had developed a clear action plan. She would use frequent-flier miles to visit her friend and would check out job opportunities in the D.C. area. She made that trip and quickly found a new job. Six months later, her former department was terminated. She was now happily resettled in Washington, earning 50 percent more money in her new job — which included arranging the conference on transportation she had dreamed.
Dreaming is not only about soul; it’s also about keeping body and soul together. Dreaming is one of the vital resources that help us get through life’s obstacle course.
Are you feeling wistful about the dreams you’ve missed? There are places we can go to look for lost dreams.
The Office of Lost and Found Dreams
What happens to the dreams we don’t remember?
I’ve asked myself that question on several mornings when I’ve awoken with little or no dream recall while feeling that the night had been active.
On one such morning, I decided to linger in bed and see whether I could find a place where I could recover lost dreams. I found myself approaching an old-time cinema that reminded me of a movie theater where I used to go as a boy to watch Saturday matinees. I was amazed and delighted to find that, this time, the movie titles on the marquee and the images on the posters in the lobby all throbbed with significance in my present life.
Waking the Sleeping King was blazoned in lights.
One of the posters showed a boy riding a monster of the deep through a stormy ocean. Another depicted a steamy romance. The girl at the ticket kiosk smiled and gestured for me to go through. Soon I was settled in a comfy, padded velvet seat in a private screening room. As dream images filled the screen, I realized I had a choice. I could remain a comfortable observer, or I could enter the fray.
On another morning, after coffee, I decided to try the same method again. This time, instead of going back to the movie house, I found myself drawn to the kind of video store that is almost defunct, thanks to our new instant-delivery systems. This video store was vast, with its products arranged on many levels, On the first floor, dreams were arranged like DVDs on shelves according to familiar categories — drama, comedy, family, and so on. There was a large adult section, most of whose content was unfamiliar to me. I realized that a block had been placed on some of this material so that it did not reach my conscious mind, or — in cases where the film had been rated I (for intrusion) — had not been allowed through during the night.
I discovered sections devoted to my dreams of individual people. I had only to focus on a name or title, and the movie began to play all around me, so I could enter it at will.
On a lower level