DREAM RECALL
The truth is that even if we don’t usually remember our dreams, we are all epic dreamers – we each dream about 5 dreams every night as we cycle through our nightly sleep patterns. Dreaming is a biological process that unfolds naturally within each one of us, effortlessly. Remembering our dreams however, is where the effort comes in. Our dream memory functions as the “bridge” between our dreaming world and our waking world. Like a living bridge made of woven branches reaching towards each other, if our dream memory is not tended to and well maintained, then many of our dreams will fall through the cracks as we wake, sinking back down into the mists of our unconscious.
“A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened”
Babylonian Talmud
Making the effort to weave a reliable bridge between the worlds is the most fundamental action of all dreaming practices. The gifts of our dreaming flow to us directly from the wisdom of nature, and are spun into brilliant and fantastical works of poetic art by our infinitely creative Moon mind. She takes us on deeply emotional and profound journeys while we sleep, and the echoes of her soulful songs float about our ears as we wake. But it is our waking Sun mind who must make the effort to turn towards her—to stretch his arms like strong branches across the chasm of our unconscious depths to meet her half-way. The effort this takes is well-rewarded as this bridge will allow us to return from our dreamtime journeys still carrying the precious images from our beloved Moon within our hearts.
SACRED DREAMING SPACE
The first step in weaving this bridge is to set our intention clearly that we desire to remember our dreams. This requires creating ‘sacred space’ for dreaming in both our hearts and our homes. This might look like clearing all clutter from your bedroom and creating a peaceful and beautiful space for sleeping and dreaming. Perhaps lighting a candle or misting essential oils around the room as you whisper, “This space is clear and open to receive dreams of wisdom, grace and healing tonight.” Ceremony and ritual are very dear to our beloved Moon mind and often the best way to invite her in.
Setting intention is more than casually wanting something to happen – it is the energetic force behind every creation becoming manifest.
Toko-pa Turner
REST!
Honouring our dreamtime goes hand in hand with honouring our rest and our sleep. We need to be rebels against the grind culture and value the times of surrender and receptivity when we stop incessantly doing, producing and controlling and allow ourselves to let go and receive. Going to bed early and allowing plenty of time for yourself to sleep in and doze in the morning will give your mind the quality time and energy that it needs to dream deeply and remember vividly.
AWAKEN GENTLY
To awaken gently and naturally after a full night’s rest, without the shock of a buzzing alarm blasting through our peaceful slumber, allows us to linger for longer in the liminal space where our waking and dreaming minds merge.
In the beginning you might not remember many (or any) of your dreams. This is nothing to worry about – dream memory is a skill like any other, it requires some practice and perseverance. When you wake just remain still as you search your memory for remnants of dream images. Avoid moving or rolling over and keep your eyes closed as you explore the residual images within your mind’s eye.
Even if you can’t remember anything at first it’s important to not give up too quickly. Remain lying still with your eyes closed and spend a good amount of time and effort trying to remember what you dreamt. Think of the dream memory as a living bridge of tree branches, and the harder you try to remember your dreams in the morning the further you grow your branches outwards across the chasm. As the bridge stretches further and grows stronger, the more vivid your dream memories will become.
As you lie in bed stretching the branches of your awareness towards your dream memories, ask yourself how you feel. Feelings can lead you back to dreams. Move your eyes around behind your closed eyelids – this activates different sections of your memory bank. Ask yourself questions and allow answers to gently surface in your mind’s eye, such as “Where was I?” “What did I see?” “Who was I with?” Sinking back down towards sleep as you do this helps your memory to reconnect with dream scenes and images.
When you do remember a dream image or scene then retrace the dream events backwards and forwards in your mind several times until you have recaptured as many details of the dream as you can. Once you hold the memory clearly in your mind you can open your eyes and begin to move and stretch your body. The next step is to write down everything you remember in your Dream Journal as soon as possible. If you don’t have time to record the whole dream then just make a few notes of the main events, characters and symbols of the dream so that the memories don’t slip away.
YOUR DREAM JOURNAL
Keeping a dream journal – a book just for your dream experiences – is an essential practice for both dream recall and dreamwork. A nice pen that will make writing smooth and enjoyable is a big help. Keep both of these by your bed and set your intention before sleep to remember your dreams and write them down as soon as you wake up.
For enhancing dream recall it is really important to write down every dream you remember in your Dream Journal. Even if you only remember flashes or images, write them down. Honouring a dream by writing it down is an act of reverence to our Moon Mind, and encourages her to speak her dreaming voice more clearly. It can be notoriously difficult to force ourselves to write down our dreams when we wake up sleepily in the morning! But every time we do so we are strengthening our memory bridge between the worlds and sending powerful messages to our dream memory to be vigilant, and not let those precious experiences slip away. If we wake from a dream during the night then jotting down some keywords of symbols and characters is usually sufficient to trigger the larger memory of the dream in the morning. You can also record a voice message on your phone if you find this easier.
Your dream journal is your book of Soul.
Robert Moss
HOW TO RECORD YOUR DREAMS
Give your dream a simple title, note the date and (if you wish) the moon phase. Try to capture the authentic experience of the dream as faithfully and honestly as you can as you write it down. Your dream is a gift from your feminine Moon mind, and even if we don’t understand the dream we need to simply trust in her intelligence and record the dream exactly as it was presented to us.
Using present tense (for example, “I am floating over an ocean and I see a giant whale” instead of “I was floating over an ocean and I saw a giant whale”) will help to keep the feelings of the dream much more present and alive. In dream circle we will be sharing our dream as a journey for our sisters to experience themselves, so record as many details of the landscape, colours, textures and scenes as you can. The richer and more sensuous the imagery, the deeper your sisters will be able to experience your dream.
Write your dreams on the left hand pages of your journal and save the right hand pages for notes and reflections from your waking mind. More than anything else it is our active engagement with our dreams from the waking state that will encourage them to speak to us. Honouring and journeying deeply into the feelings of our dreams, delving into the mythic language of our dream symbols and themes and embodying their medicine, are at the heart of Dreaming Sister’s dream circles.
KEEPING AN OPEN MIND & GENTLE HEART
As you begin to remember more of your dreams you may find yourself recalling scary dreams or uncomfortable dreams. Some dreams are confronting, even horrible, or may remind us of painful past events that we would rather forget. We might wake up feeling awful and wishing that we hadn’t remembered the dream we just had.
Dreams can be can painful experiences sometimes and this has caused many people to shut down their dream memory and burn their dream bridges because they feel hurt by their own dreams. Uncomfortable feelings of fear, disgust and shame have caused many of us to subconsciously ‘erase’ our dreams on waking throughout our lives.
We need to change this pattern and be gentle and tender with our newly awakening dream memories. Dreams invite us to feel more deeply, because feelings that have not been adequately felt nor tenderly held, will remain stuck within our body and our unconscious, leading to a state of dis-ease. In dreams, and in life, the feeling itself is the healing. If we can lean towards a feeling, instead of succumbing to our conditioned reactions of resisting, fighting, ignoring or running away, then our painful feelings can being to flow, move, evolve, and heal.
Through deep feeling, we can experience the full spectrum of our soul.
Painful dreams are often reminders of the unprocessed emotions that are keeping our soul stuck under layers of prison-like conditioning. Dream circle offers us a safe and supportive space to feel these feelings, and have them witnessed and held by the tender hearts of our sisters. But we can also do this for ourselves. Using our calm and regular breath to activate our para-sympathetic nervous system while we deeply feel our dream feelings allows our body to process, digest and clear emotional blockages that may have been present from our earliest years of childhood. Leaving us feeling lighter and much more free to act and connect heart-to-heart from a place of soul, rather than react and disconnect from a place of conditioned protection.
Remember that for every shadow there is also light; dreams are always leading us to greater spiritual evolution. They are always guiding us into the light and forwards on our spiritual path. This necessarily involves bringing up our shadow sides to be revealed, acknowledged, loved, forgiven and healed. Much of our waking lives are actually spent in ego-protection mode and it is this behaviour that is most often exposed by our dreams. Our dreams can be quite painfully ego-destroying because they want us to drop the limitations imposed by our unconscious conditioning, and get on with freely living our Soul Purpose.
Repressing, censoring or denying our dream memories is effectively denying the voice of our true selves, and this will severely block our spiritual growth and potential. We need to focus instead on developing a deep self-esteem that is not ego-dependent. So whatever the dream is be sure to keep an open mind and a heart full of courage as you write down the details in your journal. Be aware of any resistance you feel to writing the dreams down – is this resistance a result of not wanting to accept something within the dream? These resistances often occur around the most powerful dream material; that which we have most been avoiding. Try to approach all of your dreams with the same gentle, loving and tender curiosity. Be gentle with your dreams, and gentle with yourself. Dreams are rarely what they appear to be; they have hidden emotional medicines that work on deep symbolic, mythic levels. Remind yourself that your dreams are on your side and have your best interests at heart. They are always focussed on your personal healing and wholeness, and the healing of our collective world. If you have recurring nightmares or PTSD then please reach out to a professional dream therapist who can assist you in working with your dreams.
When we honour all of our dreams and treat them as sacred, they will reveal more of their sacred nature to us. When we approach our dreams with magic in our hearts, the magic of the dream is able to shine forth.
AFFIRMATIONS
Some of our main obstacles to easy dream recall lie in our limiting beliefs and attitudes towards our dreams and towards our own potential. Dreams are incredible mirrors of our own consciousness. Like sacred texts, to the uninitiated they can seem to have little or merely superficial meanings. While to those who know how to awaken the deeper mysteries they can have immense transcendental power and wisdom.
Let’s look at some of the basic assumptions that most of us were raised and conditioned with :
Dreams are not important and basically just the brain “taking out the trash”
There is no other realm but the physical, material realm
My consciousness exists only inside my brain and the rest of the world is separate from me
The imaginal world is not real and therefore dreamwork is a waste of time
Well… raised with this mindset, it’s no wonder we can have trouble honouring and remembering our dreams!
We need to reprogram our old belief systems (the collective conditioning inherited from our parents and our society) to now include the real magic of dreaming as our innate gift. Our old beliefs will need to be replaced with new ones. Allow your rational mind to relax and open to these truths to as you read them now. Choose the affirmations that most resonate with truth for you, or make up your own, and feel them in your heart as you speak them:
Dreams are sacred journeys into the dreaming realms
When I honour my dreams their magic is revealed to me
Dreams connect me with my soul
I remember all of my dreams when I wake because dreaming is so dear to me
I write all my dreams in my dream journal because dreaming is so dear to me
There are no ‘bad’ dreams and there are no ‘bad’ feelings
All dreams are healing and worth remembering in detail
My dreams connect me with the Goddess and the divine within me
My dreams are always aligned with my greatest good
My dreams guide me forward on my path of spiritual evolution
My dreams take me deep into the dreaming realm
The dreaming realm is real and I can experience it for myself
I am One with the world around me
DREAM CIRCLE
Joining a dream circle, or organising your own, is one of the most powerful ways to boost our dream recall because it gives us an extra incentive to remember our dreams. Knowing that we will be sharing and deepening the medicine of our dreams in sacred circle, brings our dreaming to the forefront of our awareness. And as we circle by circle deepen our relationship with our dreams, our dreams become even more-so our cherished teachers and guides. Their meanings become clearer and they become richer and more sensuous; filled with sacred encounters and soul medicines, making them much easier to recall in exquisite detail.
JOURNEYING
There is a small percentage of people who due to medical/psychological issues will not be able to develop their dream recall beyond a certain level, if at all. Luckily we don’t actually need to sleep to access the dreaming realms. Our Moon Mind is continually dreaming. However, the brightness of our waking Sun Mind usually obscures this process, just as we can’t see the stars in the sky during the daylight hours even though they are always there. Relaxing our Sun Mind and shifting our focus to our Moon Mind, through the inner-adventure known as ‘journeying’, allows us access to this dreaming stream of consciousness, that is constantly shaping our reality from the behind the scenes.
A journey is a visionary and sensory experience (also known as a shamanic journey) into our inner world that we embark upon while we are awake. This is a kind of ‘waking-dreaming’ in which you close your eyes, relax and temporarily disengage your rational mind as you allow your dreaming mind, your creative imagination, to guide you on an day-dream-like journey. This kind of waking-dreaming is often aided by shamanic drumming or binaural beats to help to guide your brainwaves into the dreaming ‘theta’ frequencies.
Journeying is an excellent way to travel into the dreaming realms from a waking state, and will also greatly strengthen our bridge-between-the-worlds, enhancing the quality of our sleep-dream recall as well. We also use journeying with drumming often during our dream circles to re-enter our dreams and recall the richness of the feelings and details that are often obscured by our waking Sun mind.
CELEBRATION & GRATITUDE
The forementioned practices make a powerful combination for all dreamers to use to build and maintain a strong and healthy memory-bridge between the waking and dreaming realms. The final step I will add is one of celebration! Practice rejoicing every time you remember a dream. Our Sun mind is our hero and thrives on gratitude, so celebrate and congratulate your waking mind for every dream you remember! And thank the spirit of your dream for her presence in your waking world as well. The magic and joy of dreaming is a gift to be sung about as we wake each morning.
ARTWORK BY Catrin Welz-Stein