Lost Treasure

The number one response I receive when I ‘m out and about asking people about their dreams, is that they don’t remember them.  The number two response is that they don’t dream.  I’ve often seen how dreams can change a person’s perspective, even give them hope.  Whenever someone tells me they don’t dream or don’t remember their dreams, it creates in me the thought that they’re getting robbed.  There’s a dream thief out there and one of the main purposes I persist in doing dream work, is to reach out to those who are having their dreams stolen.  I want to help them get their treasure back.

Here are four keys to recovering lost treasure in your dreams:

• Key #1 – Think about dreaming when you’re drifting off to sleep.  There’s this principle – You make room for whatever you focus on.  This principle shows itself when a person goes through their day focusing on everything negative they can think of.  Negativity shows up in their body language, their words, everything.  There’s no better way to repeal positive people (or people in general) than to have a negative attitude.  The same goes with dreams.  If you ignore them they’re not drawn to you.  If you focus on them before you go to sleep at night, it will go  a long way in helping you have multiple dreams every night.

• Key#2 – Start rehearsing your dreams the moment you wake up.  If you develop a discipline of thinking back through your dreams and rehearsing what happened, you will keep the dream alive.  I think of dreams as stories written on the slate of our minds in disappearing ink.  When we rehearse our dreams its like tracing over the images and words with a permanent marker.  Use the time when you’re in bed waking up to practice.  When you pull yourself out of bed to start your morning routine, you’re at lease have something to work with.  As I’ve stated before, this is a discipline.  Don’t expect to be able to remember everything about every dream at first.  As with anything, you start small.  The more you practice the more you’ll remember.

• Key #3 – Keep a paper and pen on your nightstand so you can write down dreams.  It won’t do you much good to rehearse your dreams if you don’t write them down.  If you absolutely detest writing, an alternative is to speak your dream in a voice memo.  Unfortunately, many times you won’t be able to understand what you’re saying.  The most effective way to catalog your dreams is if you write them down as soon as you have them, ie. in the middle of the night.  Yes, this is a pain and it might take some time, but when you pursue your dreams in this way, you will remember more dream details.  Go ahead, give it a try.The benefits are well worth it.

• Key #4 – Write down your dreams in a non-linear way and it will help your recall.  Dreams are never nice and tidy.  We sometimes dream in fragments, half sentences, and our dreams are filled with symbols and scenes that seem to not make any sense at all sometimes.  If you write down your dreams in a circular rotation instead of a straight line, row by row, it will help you to remember.  The reason is because when we write in a way you’re not used to, you’re forcing your brain to stray off its normal path of thinking,  When we do that, we open ourselves to new ways of recalling memories, and therefore extract new information from our dream memories.  I may have done a poor job of explaining it, but believe me, it works!  These are only four things you can do to help remember your dreams.  Do you have other ways of remembering your dreams?

EB

Nebojsa Mladjenovic / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND