How dream journaling can help

I am accustomed to sleep, and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake. – RENE DESCARTES

It’s amazing to note how our everyday life percolates through the nocturnal creative activity we all experience for approx. two hours every night, dreaming! Yes, dreaming (a huge part of the human experience) and the dreamworld is a landscape seeped in deeper meaning and symbology, a very creative time we can learn to use for self-development. We’re all nocturnal artists whether we remember our dreams or not; co-creative and co-weaving the tapestry of our lives in collaboration with the unconscious!

But have you ever noticed how dreams can seep through life and reality? It blew my mind when I began to take notice of how incognizant I have been in the past, but when I began to take note about the messages from my dreams and how they would influence my waking life, it left me dumbfounded! The dreams effortlessly merge with our mundane everyday life and infuse it with symbols, motifs, moods and colours which in turn birth new ideas and enthusiasm. Dream suggestions aid in making decisions, they provide personal revelations often amplifying emotions or alleviating anxiety and they help in making peace with difficult experiences, especially when we dream of a dead loved one.

Do you remember the mind-bending Sci-fi thriller Inception? The dream in a dream? It’s interesting to note that we usually don’t realize when we are in a dream and often, we also experience a dream in a dream and this led Descartes to surmise that there is an uncertainty about the information stimuli we receive through our five senses. In his work “Meditations on First Philosophy” he propounds the idea in a series of thought experiments and comes to the conclusion that dreams are freakishly realistic, the touch, the smells, the vivid colouration! Our mind gets confused, is this real or is this a dream? As the Upanishads have stated, “We are the dreams of the Gods”!

But how do we keep track of our dreams? The best way to do this is with a Dream Journal, so let’s try to understand how to get this going.

If you think about it logically, it becomes abundantly clear that we cannot work with something we forget(and we do tend to forget dreams!!!), so these non linear narratives that appear as ephemeral bubbles on the cinemascope of our sleeping minds need to be recorded systematically. Their impermanence needs to be given some sort of permanence, but then is anything ever permanent? Or is our quest for permanence an ingrained human frailty developed as a trauma response to the inevitability, death!

If you’d rather not pen down the dreams, then just record an audio clip once you wake up and save them neatly by assigning dates in your dream folder. Jotting them down often means you can just refresh your mind with a quick glance at the page because your memory mutates. Have you heard of false memories? Humans tend to embellish or fabricate experiences that have been termed as False memories that appear very real and are often indistinguishable from reality.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s like our minds are working against us; why else would it create false memories? No one knows why this happens, but there is a certain mystery to this. Maybe all these memories are visions of parallel realities we’re living in the multiverse? As we tend to falsify reality, we can do the same with dreams. Best to just keep it solid by writing it or recording it and use memory triggers (words associated with feelings) so you can remember what you wrote with precise imagery because studies have shown that we remember dreams laden with emotional strength over generic ones.

Once you build a practice of jotting down these dreams, you’ll see it as an invaluable tool of self-awareness. Your inner space suddenly opens up revealing a new vista. The richness of the dream experience also provides an outlet to express the more repressed feelings or as Carl Jung termed it, The Shadow self. There is a Hyde in all of us that needs to be acknowledged and integrated, possible by gleaning the dreamscape by journaling about it. There is much insight to be gained and healing to be found.

Dream journaling also provides an electro shock therapy to your creative mind which is vivified with ideas as the linear way to experience time is no longer a hindrance. Time dilation is experienced in dreams. It’s as if Saturn, Father Time himself has no control over our dreams, although he has dominion of the material world. In the ineffability of the dream world, our sense of SELF metamorphoses (breaks down) as often dreams have no rigid meaning and everything becomes a signifier of something else feeding information to an infinite quantum loop. It’s interesting to see how nonsensical narratives appear in our dreams and the effervescence of positing meaning becomes redundant. Dreams show us different perspectives and this fosters compassion.

Buy a unique journal or you can even create it and before starting just set the intention that your dreams are important and they deserve time to be recorded. Then before going to sleep, practice this self-affirmation, “Tonight I will remember my dreams and I will engage with them.” Just make sure to have the dream journal ready right by your bedside, easily accessible so you can pen down your thoughts, feelings and experiences as soon you wake up.

It’s also possible that you might wake up in the middle of the night after a disturbing dream, make sure to jot it down even if it’s 3 am and you’re all sleepy and groggy because being half-asleep actually helps in dream recollection. Make sure to wake up slowly because if you move abruptly, it can result in total forgetfulness and if you’re using a voice recording app, you might want to whisper.

Another sure shot way of dream recall is to confide in your friends or lover and discuss the intricacies of your dreamscape with them. They might offer valuable guidance and penetrating insights and shed light on things you’d not considered. When you reveal your dreams to your loved ones, often, a pattern emerges. You can pay special attention to recurring themes because there is an inner meaning to that dream and if discovered and resolved( or integrated) then it might help you with the process of self-actualization.

Hopefully this text has convinced you not to ignore your dreams any further and to do your due diligence by dream keeping because within those dreams provide creative solutions on the journey of self-development. Make this practice of dream journaling a sacred one and let the divine communicate through your unconscious.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. – CARL JUNG

The article has been authored by Tina Mukerji, a soul guide working with Astrology, Tarot, Psychism, Yoga, Tantra, Breathwork and Mantras. She works to discover the inherent archetypes, by studying astrological charts.