Recording Your Dreams - Part Three
Remembering your dreams is a process of training yourself and giving yourself permission to use the material which is presented to you. However, remembering a dream is only the first step in the process. To get the most out of these exercises you need to take positive steps to demonstrate your willingness to act on the information that you become aware of. This will give your dreams great power and your new behaviour will have an enormous impact on your day to day life.
See the sample layout page for your dream journal. When you wake, follow these steps:
| Step One | Jot down the key symbols from the dream in the narrow column, and write brief phrases or any key ideas that come to your mind about the dream in the wider column. This is a key step. Do not write detailed notes at this stage. Keep the list short and sweet. What you are doing at this point is creating hooks to link back into the dream events. At this stage, don't concern yourself with the order of the events. Just jot down the key symbols and ideas. |
| Step Two | Narrate the dream out loud to a tape or to your partner. If you have done step one properly,
you will now have a hook directly into the dream symbols before they begin to fade from your conscious memory.
It usually helps if you keep your eyes closed for this part of the exercise so that you are not distracted by your external reality.
Make sure the radio and the music is off.
If you don't have time to do steps 3 & 4 straight away, it wont matter, because you have:
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| Step Three | Recall as much of the dream as you possibly can. Be focussed. Try to step back into the dream and re-experience the actual dream events. |
| Step Four | Write out the dream in as much detail as you can remember in the wider column of your journal. After writing the dream out in detail, go through the dream and underline key words and symbols. Write down any associated thoughts and ideas in the small column. Do not try to decipher the symbols at this stage. Keep your mind open. If you get stumped, try using a good thesaurus, which is a list of associated ideas with common cultural roots. At this stage of the analysis, all associated thoughts and links are equally valid. |
| Step Five | Analyse the dream by linking the key symbols and events. Use your personal dictionary of dream symbols as the keys. You may take some time to find all the layers of meaning in the dream, as the symbols are multi-tiered. As such, they may be pointing to many different issues, layers of beliefs, values and concepts. |
You will find that you get more from your dreams if you go back and revisist your symbols periodically. Experience suggests that they tend to evolve over time. The better you understand your personal dream symbols, the easier you will find it to read them, and the more information you will be able to glean from your journal. There is always a great sense of joy to re-read a dream from years before, and to realise that both you, and your dream symbols, have evolved.