The very act of recording a dream is fascinating. It improves your awareness of the dream state, making it easier to recall dreams and work with them. If you are wondering why you should even bother recalling a dream, well, dreams have been responsible for some major creative and scientific discoveries in human history.
In 1965, Paul McCartney of the legendary pop group The Beatles composed the entire melody for the hit acoustic song Yesterday in a dream. It came back to him in its entirety when he woke up and he quickly replicated the song on his piano, asking his family and friends if they had ever heard it before. He was initially worried that he was replicating someone else’s work.
Similarly, Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, often spoke of the inspirational dream that led to his most revolutionary discovery of the structure of the atom. Even Albert Einstein, famous for his genius insights, credited many of those insights to his dreams. “Einstein’s Dreams” is a fascinating read about the collage of stories Einstein dreamed in 1905 on the brink of his breakthrough discoveries.
When you start to successfully capture dreams and begin to keep a dream diary, the following are some wonderful benefits you can expect:
1. Keeping a dream diary provides us a record.
Dreams are quite fleeting. Most dreams get lost shortly after we have them. Often you won’t remember a dream after only a few hours, or a few days at most. Why allow yourself to forget all your dreams forever when you can keep them on record? Keeping a dream diary ensures your dreams are safely recorded and you can go back to them whenever you want in future.
2. Keeping a dream diary can inspire creativity.
Dreams are also powerful tools for creative inspiration. When you read your dream diary and recall dreams, you engage different parts of the brain and trigger your mind to think in a totally different way that you might not otherwise have been able to do. That’s almost always a good thing for getting your creative juices moving, especially when you’ve hit a creative mental block.
3. Keeping a dream diary can lead to brilliant discoveries.
As already mentioned, who knows what brilliant insights or discoveries are waiting to be unearthed in your dreams. One dream can result in a brilliant discovery or invention that alters not just your world or the world of your loved ones, but also the course of the whole world in general.
4. Keeping a dream diary allows us to appreciate our own mental growth.
Being able to look back on a dream later and think, “Ah, interesting” or “Geez, that was a weird dream” can be a lot of fun, not to mention eye-opening. It could give you an appreciation of your own mental growth a few years into the future looking back and seeing where your mind was compared to where your mind is at currently. For many people, this is enough reason in itself to keep a dream diary.
5. Keeping a dream diary allows us to observe our sub-conscious.
The beauty of keeping a dream diary is that when you read through it, dreams come flooding back into memory. You see details of your subconscious thoughts vividly all over again, meaning you can analyze what was/is going on in your subconscious mind. Even if you are not keen on analyzing your dreams, knowing what your deepest thoughts are is oftentimes quite enlightening. And besides, the simple act of writing down dreams can be therapeutic too, just like keeping a regular diary.
Conclusion: Dreams are not the meaningless, corrupt or delusional fantasies some make them out to be
Psychologists no longer dismiss dreams as mere fantasies or random neurons firing. Today they recognize dreams as an ongoing thought process that happens while we are asleep. That is why it is a great idea to journal your dreams. If you don’t journal your dreams, you might never know what profound thoughts are happening while you are asleep, and what impact those thoughts might have on your waking life.
Admittedly, though, oftentimes when we want to remember dreams all we have when we wake up in the morning is a vague recollection of a place or the lingering feeling of being upset. It doesn’t seem worth writing down.
If you have trouble remembering dreams, be patient with yourself. Putting too much pressure on yourself to dream or having high expectations to recall dreams will only exasperate the situation and leave you feeling more disappointed or frustrated.
Dreams are erratic. They will come around in their own sweet time. And when they do come, try lucid anchoring to capture them.
Try this lucid anchoring exercise to capture your dreams
Lucid anchoring comes from the fascinating branch of psychology called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). Just before you fall asleep, pick an item that you can see clearly from your bed. It can be a prominent picture hung on the wall, for example. This will be your anchor.
Look at this picture when you go to sleep, wake up during the night and first thing in the morning. When you look at the picture say to yourself, “I will remember my dreams.” The phrase acts as a trigger for your unconscious brain to associate the picture with remembering dreams. It’s a statement of intent that informs your mind to focus on your dreams and remember them.
Look at that picture multiple times each night to improve the odds of remembering dreams. It’s also advisable to have on hand a book light or pen with a light attached for recording the most vivid images or emotions from a dream right in the middle of the night upon awakening. Don’t trust you’ll remember your dream in the morning—many amazing dreams and brilliant ideas are lost with that assumption.
Featured photo credit: Eugenio Marongiu via shutterstock.com
