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DREAM TIPS
This page is devoted to creative dream tips for the dreamer in all of us. Whether you are just beginning to pay attention to your dreams or have been at this dream business for a while, I will be offering concepts, ideas and topics which you can apply to your own dream life to enhance and enrich your experience! Let’s start with the basics – journaling!
THE DREAM JOURNAL ART & PRACTICE
Your Journal should be used exclusively for expressing content to do with your dreams. By crafting a journal, you are creating an expectation that you will be recording your dreams. The Dream Journal is a highly sacred and personal receptacle for your dreams, and by placing them there, you outwardly demonstrate your reverence and respect for them. They become the gifts from your psyche, as they are revealed to you.
Establishing the practice of recording your dreams, you activate the rich resources of your unconscious mind and will find a new enthusiasm and joy, as you practice and process. Some of the byproducts are renewed imagination and creativity available to you.
The study of symbolism is not mere erudition; it concern's man's knowledge of himself. Symbolism is an instrument of knowledge … it does not merely equate, it must reveal some essential part of the subject to be understood…. ~ J.C. Cooper
There has never been a time in my conscious memory when dreams and symbols did not fascinate me. As a child, I would tell my mother each night before bed that The Sandman was coming to bring me a dream and that I would tell her about it in the morning. I kept a diary from age eight to record daily events, activities, thoughts…and my dreams. For nearly five decades, these diaries have grown into journals and dream journals that have held the recorded images and symbols of dream life; sometimes as many as five each night.
My goal for you is to establish the appreciation, and hopefully passion, fascination and reverence for these nightly images that flash across your dreaming mind. In so doing, you will develop the practice of creative journaling. You will find a way of expressing, examining and cherishing your dreams in a different and refreshing manner that is unique to you. Journaling will become the cornerstone for your dream experiences and will provide a permanent reference for you to measure, consult and revisit your dream content.
DREAM JOURNAL CONSTRUCTION & RECORDING
The suggested materials include an 8 ½"x11" 3-ring binder and index dividers. I suggest labeling your dividers into weeks and months. Use both plain and ruled filler paper in each weekly section. Get creative! Decorate your journal cover with fabric, yarn, paint, found objects, foil – anything that personalizes and expresses your love of dreams. Have both a pen and pencil tucked into a pocket or clipped to its cover at all times.
Since your journals are a private accounting of your dreams, store it in a place where it will be left undisturbed.
Before going to sleep, place your journal next to your bedside. In the morning (or if awakened at night during a dream cycle) record your dreams before getting out of bed. It is a fact that we "lose" the memories of our dreams after the first five minutes of conscious awareness.
When first awake, lie still and let the essentials of the dream seep into the cells of your body. The movement of the body (e.g., bounding out of bed at the first glimmer of light) will lessen the ability to recall your dreams; when the body is active, the dream will fade.
If you are anxious about time constraints, concentrate on the colors, images, textures, people, themes and symbols in the dream. Jot them down in an essential form, as if you were writing a postcard to someone about the place you had just visited.