Dream Mapping

  There are no two ways about it, long dreams can be confusing. Even if you’ve dealt with dreams every day like I do, long dreams of four or more scenes can get a little overwhelming.  Frankly, it’s quite a lot of information to remember.  A long dream can be overwhelming and leave you feeling like you’ve been broadsided by the TMI express.

  What can you do to make long dreams easier to deal with?  You can break the dream down into individual scenes, for one. This can be done by focusing on everything that happened in one particular location and let it sink in a bit before moving on.  Then move on to the next scene, and the next scene.

  There’s absolutely no reason to be in a hurry when you’re working through long dream scenes.  Take your time, look at the individual scenes, and summarize it in one or two brief sentences.  The idea is to break the dream apart into manageable bites.

  An even better way to do this is map the dream.  The purpose of dream mapping is to break a long dream down into its most basic elements.  So what is dream mapping?  It’s simply taking individual scenes of long dreams and converting them into pictures.

   At first, the thought of drawing a dream scene can be a bit intimidating.  What do you draw to accurate depict what happened?  Is it possible to draw a picture to accurately depict what happened?

  It’s not as difficult as you think.

  The trick to doing this is to draw enough of the setting of the dream scene to set the stage of the action, just enough to remind you of what happened in the scene.  Move on to the next scene and the next until you have one drawing for each scene of the long dream.  Your dream will not only be easier to keep track of, but you’ll be able to easily look for things the scenes have in common.

  The next time you have a long dream, write it down by breaking it up into scenes and dream map those scenes with drawings of the setting of each scene.  You’ll notice it will make all the difference in understanding the dream.

  EB

 Photo credit: Decorating and other stuff via Foter.com / CC BY-SA