Because learning about your brain and sleep can be fun . . .
Can you use an app on your phone as a dream journal? You can. The better question, however, is whether you should. Any old notebook works far better than a phone. If it’s of a convenient size, you can also keep the notebook or journal with you all day to jot down any ideas that…
It’s not at all widely talked about, but did you know your dreams can help heal you? Whether or not you remember them, they can help heal you mentally and emotionally. That ties into actual physical healing as detailed in books like The Body Keeps the Score If you remember dreams and work with them,…
Your alarm goes off, and you wake up suddenly. You get up, and you’ve got somewhere to go. The dream fades. You wake up wondering what time it is. How much longer do you have to sleep? You look at the clock on your phone or on the nightstand. The dream fades. Your bed partner…
Question: What do news reports, professional reports, certain types of poems, lyrics, and short stories all have in common? Answer: Frameworks. Sometimes referred to as formats or templates, frameworks are essential to taming a flow of information. Dreams are a type of information. A framework helps organize the information so you can understand it and…
If you keep a dream diary for a while and try to understand each dream you recover, you’ll soon realize not every dream has a deeper meaning. Not every dream illuminates some insight into the subconscious. Sometimes a dream illustrates a slice of your life from the near-present or the past. But sometimes the dream…
You might not have your lighted pen handy. You might not have your dream journal available, and there’s nothing else to write on that’s available. You might have a spouse or partner next to you in bed. Turning the bedside light on to write your dream down wouldn’t be kind, especially if they have something…
In a previous post, I compared several weeks of my dream journal to Blue Opossum’s. He responded to the April 12 blog post by e-mail. Blue Opossum is a metacognitive dreamer. He’s aware of a whole lot of his dreams, far more than most people. There are misconceptions in your post, but that is to…
Understanding yourself better using your dream journal (Part 6/7) Blue Opossum (a pseudonym) is a K-12 educator from Australia. He has an incredibly detailed recall of his dreams and a heightened awareness of the different stages of sleep. He’s got a real gift. Born in 1960, his dream journal, for practical purposes, starts in 1963…
The how and why of understanding yourself better using your dream journal (Part 5/7) Don’t compare yourself to others. Be yourself. Compare yourself to yourself. These ideas find their way into all kinds of creative expressions. There’s a big reason it’s on so many minds. Creators are creative people. Each has a spark or many…
Part 3/7 Everyone, no matter how young or old they are, has dreams. They also have other people in their life, people who might not understand their dreams the way they do. They can’t. No matter how close you are to someone, your experiences and their experiences are different. You’re two different people after all.…
—Part 2/7 Without a written record, dreams are quickly forgotten, often as soon as an hour of waking up. There is no good way to remember your dreams without a written dream journal, preferably on paper. With paper, you can draw. You can write notes in the margins. It’s far more flexible. Understanding the dream…
In Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol, the old, miserly protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge confronts his nightmares and emerges a better man. Dickens describes him as greedy, ill-tempered, and grasping. Scrooge, at least, is good in that he becomes a better person by the end of the story. Dream journalers sometimes have nightmares so unsettling they don’t…
Make sure your dream journal is ready for writing every night. Your dream journaling hobby needs to be a habit. When it’s a habit, it’s at its most powerful. We spend one-third of the day sleeping or in bed. One-third of the day, every day, adds up to a long time. That’s a lot of…