Because learning about your brain and sleep can be fun . . .
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 7/7) When you compare your dream journal to someone else’s, you’re probably coming as close as you can to seeing the inner mind of someone very different from you, no matter who they are. They have a different personality, different experiences, and different roles and reasons for…
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…
Part 1/7 “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” Donald Rumsfeld When former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said…
Dream journaling should never be a grind. It should be part of a routine. Once you know how to do it, once you develop the habit, dream journaling is the easiest and most convenient form of meditation with all the results. Yet all habits have a beginning and an end. Maybe, for some reason, the…
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…
What were you doing in the dream? Fighting, I don’t know. I don’t remember it well. Maybe there’s a puzzling line or two a character spoke in the dream. “Hopa, hopa!” What does that even mean? What makes a faded dream? A memory is formed in your brain by linking it to other memories. For…
The time it takes to understand a dream can be much longer than it takes to have it. It’s one key point when it comes to dream interpretation. Unbound by physical constraints, unlike other information transmitted through your five primary senses, dreams are more than pictures: they’re communications affecting all the senses. You’re making a…
Not every dream is symbolic of something, though many are. People tend to ignore the dreams without symbols unless they’re an instance of deja vu where one has the feeling they’ve been somewhere or done something before. Dream journalers tend to talk about dreams with symbols more often. They’re more interesting because we learn from those dreams.…