Our dreams are an incredible way of tapping into our own lives and analysing what is happening. Our dreams reflect our anxieties and problems that we are experiencing every day. Sometimes our dreams can even offer a solution, or some insight. They give us messages and guidance and if we know how to interpret them we can make them work for us in improving our lives.
Remembering dreams
Remembering your dreams is key to being able to analyze them and making them work for you. Although everyone dreams, not everyone can remember their dreams however this can be easily remedied with practice and patience. If your dreams are elusive, you can train yourself to remember them in detail. The best way to do this is to keep a dream journal and record your dreams in it every morning. At first you may not be recording anything more than a slight recollection of a particular emotion or physical sensation.
If your dreams are hard to pin down, here are some tips on how to increase the likelihood of remembering them :
- Keep a notepad or your dream journal, plus a pen or pencil next to your bed so they are easily accessible.
- Make sure you can easily reach a light switch, so that you can see what you’re writing if you want to jot down a dream in the middle of the night.
- When you wake from a dream, don’t move or speak. Stay in the same position in which you were sleeping. Mentally run through your dream and then write it down immediately. If you don’t do soon after waking, the dream may escape you.
- Sometimes a dream fades quickly after waking and is apparently gone forever. Yet it may return to you during the day, in which case you should write it down immediately before it vanishes. Alternatively you might remember it while you are falling asleep that night, in which case once again you should write it down. This will tell your unconscious to remember your dreams.
Have you ever been consciously aware that you have made a choice and changed the course of a dream?
This could have been a ‘Lucid Dream‘. A lucid dream is an ordinary dream that differs in one respect : the sleepier is aware of being asleep and can consciously alter the course of the dream. This can be especially helpful for someone who has a repeated nightmare, because he is gradually able to train his brain to alter the outcome of the dream and therefore change its nightmarish quality. Lucid dreaming has the added benefit of enabling the dreamer to confront whatever is frightening him in his dream and, by doing so, to control and then lose his fears.
Just as we can train ourselves to remember our ordinary dreams we can also train ourselves to dream lucidly. The most important technique is to believe that you can experience lucid dreaming. If you unconsciously believe that it is beyond your abilities, that is how it will remain. It helps to recognize what are often called ‘ dream signs ‘ – experiences in a dream that tell the dreamer she is asleep. This might be anything from realizing that she is in a strange body, to knowing that she’s experiencing something that would be impossible in waking life.
Lucid dreams are thought to happen more frequently in the morning or during an afternoon nap. One of the most productive ways to induce a lucid dream is to wake up 90 minutes earlier than usual in the morning , stay awake for 90 minutes and then go back to sleep.
Its incredible that changing the times of your sleeping habits and changing your thought process can allow us to tap into our dreams and make them an incredible experience. Now not only can you enjoy every day for the experiences you are given but you can also do this at night.