Keeping Your Dream Alive
One of the foundational principles of understanding your dreams is keeping the dream alive. We all know how elusive dreams can be. They’re like personal short stories written in disappearing ink. We may think we’ll remember a dream as we’re waking up, only to often times have it evaporate into thin air.
I’ve found some helpful ways of keeping even the most elusive of your dreams alive. Now, before we go on, I have to say that there are dreams that we simply cannot draw out. They will remain elusive and there’s very little we can do about it. I’ll save the reasons why for another blog post. But of the dreams we can draw out of obscurity, let’s take a look at some practical examples.
Perhaps the most practical thing you can do to keep your dreams alive, and one that is the least popular, is writing them down. I mean like right after you wake up and the dream details are still vivid in your mind. Even if its two thirty in the morning! This can be incredibly annoying, especially if you don’t have a pen and tablet of paper at your bedside. It can be the things that nuclear wars are made of if your sleeping partner is a light sleeper. But everything from nuclear war to annoyance can be avoided if a person plans ahead. I’ve found that a legal pad by the side of the bed with a reliable pen (preferably one that lights up at the writing end) are the simplest steps you can take to make sure you capture all the details while they’re still fresh in your mind.
So in a perfect world we’re all going to write our dreams down in a dream journal every night. The second tip to keeping your dreams alive is for those of us who don’t live in a perfect world. It is simply this. Tell someone your dream. Get up in the morning and tell the dream to the first family member or friend you see. This keeps your dream alive, even if the person you tell doesn’t have a clue what your dream means.
The third tip to keeping your drams alive is honoring your dreams. How do you do that? The best way I know to honor your dreams is to pay attention to them. This could mean saying a little something as your drifting off to sleep like “I’m going to pay attention to the details of my dreams tonight.” You can also contemplate the dreams you do remember. Take a few minutes after you finish this article and relive a dream that you remember the most about. You may even want to write it down (which is another way to honor your dreams).
These three simple steps can help you keep your dream alive. Have you found other ways of keeping your dreams alive. Please share in the comments.
EB