Your dreams can be a spring of creative inspiration to help you create new artistic works, solve problems at work and in your relationships, heal emotional wounds and even physical illnesses. Craig Sim Webb from DREAMS Foundation gives you some tips to help you recall your dreams.
Learn new skills, explore the vast inner realm for greater spiritual fulfilment, and all the while, allow you yourself to explore and have fun during the third of life that we all spend asleep. If these possibilities sound interesting, don’t just take my word for it. Begin better to remember your dreams tonight and start experiencing for yourself the fascinating adventures and powerful hidden benefits your subconscious is trying to offer you every night. Here are proven techniques for recalling more dreams within a week or less.
The main barrier to recalling and benefiting from dreams is that waking and dreaming memory aren’t connected nearly as well as they could be with greater intention, practice and focus. Making a relatively consistent effort to remember and especially to record your dreams will help your waking mind align and integrate your dream experience. It’s also an excellent way to increase imaginative and intuitive capabilities, which are both intimately connected with dreams. This alone should provide strong incentive.
It’s important to want it:
First and foremost, you must feel that it will be useful or even valuable to you. Without this intention, motivation will soon disappear. More importantly, this desire acts as a subjective magnet, which draws your dreams into memory.
Focus and attention:
Understand that dream recall is an inherent, natural human trait. That is why young children are quite in touch with their dreams, as are many native cultures, some of which encourage the sharing of dreams with each other daily and the basing of important life actions upon the guidance to be found in the dream world. Dream recall is like a mental muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. Without exercise, it may shrink, but it is there if you decide to work it out again. So if your recall is poor, trust that it will come in time, and the trust itself will actually help since expectation is a powerful subjective tool.
Bedtime practice:
Before sleep, reread your dream journal entry from the night before (some people like to read a few nights’ worth). This allows you to begin to connect with your dream memory. It is also an opportunity to interpret your dreams and spot connections to the day’s events. Then, as you go to bed, clearly request (rather than command) yourself to remember any dreams when you awaken in the morning or during the night, especially ones that would be beneficial to you. Also, remind yourself that it’s a simple, natural
process that happens by itself anyway. You can also suggest to yourself to spontaneously awaken when you need to without using an alarm, since any strong external perception such as a loud noise can inhibit recall. This method works well with practice, but you may initially wish to set your alarm for 15 minutes after your suggested wake-up time, just to be safe. Whenever you awaken, keep your eyes closed
(or shut them if already open) and remain as motionless as possible. If you find that your body has shifted since waking, return your body to the position it was in when you first woke. Gather as many
images, impressions, feelings, or body sensations or waking thoughts as you can. A helpful technique is to think of it like fishing.
Gently cast out your intention to remember a dream, and wait a little to see what comes. As soon as you get anything, no matter how brief or vague it may seem at first, rise and immediately record (or write, draw, paint, etc.) it in a journal. You’ll be surprised at how much more you remember as you begin taking note of your dreams.
Be playful, patient and persistent: Although most people start having success within the first week or two, dream recall is a mental exercise that may require some getting used to. Try to maintain a relaxed and playful attitude of looking forward to your dreams while being willing to let them come all in good time. Trying too hard or being too serious can be limiting factors. Dream recall and motivation tend to
come and go in natural cycles. They can also be affected by what else is going on in your life and how much sleep and exercise you get. Once you begin a period of focusing on recall, stick with it for at least a few days. Exercising your mind in this way for consecutive nights can have a compounding effect.
A weekly study group with a shared interest in dreams is unmatchable for sustained motivation, inspiration and plenty of intriguing surprises and insights
Craig Sim Webb is a dream analyst/researcher/author and physicist/inventor with pioneering lucid dream research at Stanford University where lucid dreaming was proven scientifically and brought into mainstream awareness. He has designed personal transformation tools with worldwide distribution, and for over two decades has been privileged to be an invited expert for major motion pictures, Fortune 500 corporations, and well over a thousand media worldwide. He offer training programs online and tours globally as a passionate speaker and musical performing artist.
www.applieddreaming.com
