What happens when a dream (or nightmares, usually) drain you to the point that when you open your eyes, you just want to shut them again. And the thing is, it's this crucial lucid moment that is key to remembering that dream. The moment you don't try and grasp at this window of opportunity, is the moment the memory of the dream starts slipping away.
So what do you do when you don't have the strength to remain awake to grab the dream journal beside your bed and jot down those details?
As I've experienced this draining types of dreams, I have managed to think of a way of remembering the most important (or emotionally effective) scenes of my dreams before I go crashing back to the sea of my subconscious. Unfortunately, I still haven't found a faster way of recovering the ENTIRE dream... still working on that. Still working on convincing myself, I actually DO want to remember the ENTIRE dream. Yeah, that's the hard part. The emotional scarred me is screaming NO MORE.
Anyway, KEYWORDS! That's right. It's just like remembering a speech. You used keywords to try and remember things that stood out. Example would be of the previous dream posted [Of Trains and Ghosts (Ghost Brides)]
1. VISUALS - try to say out loud anything you can remember you've seen the moment your eyes open.
(ex. strange plants, ghost bride, unknown family and neighbors, old house, wooden house) As you can see the dream was not in that order but the brothers being impaled in those strange plants were what stood out to me the most in the dream
2. AUDIO - try repeating everything you've heard. This is harder compared to the visual.
(ex. camachile tree, crying woman, 'blood suckers') - I was unable to recall the name of the 'blood suckers'. Hard to do when sounds from the waking world affect you as well. A dream once made me feel alone in a bus going nowhere. I cried while asleep listening to 'Stitches and Burns' by Fra Lippo Lippi. I woke up and dad was playing it and I couldn't stop crying
3. SMELL, TASTE and TOUCH - perhaps the hardest of them all are these three hence I grouped them altogether. You don't actually smell anything in the dream, you just think you do. And when someone in the waking world sprays perfume it will affect your dreams as well. Since the nose and the mouth eventually join behind the throat, smell and taste are often correlated so you'll say things like, it tastes like cockroaches, even though you haven't eaten one but may perhaps have smelled one, you know, those flying roaches that land near you and you scream waving your slipper to crush it? Anyway, touch. When someone touches you in the waking world, you feel it in the dream too. A rat once bit me and I dreamt my foot was being scraped with a steel file. I know, it was intense.
So there you go.
Do we need to do this? Not really. It's a personal choice as I believe that dreams are key to how I perceive the world. Honestly, I'm not too happy about my perception if this is it... I want happy dreams... and maybe by mapping these dreams and nightmares I can condition myself to control my dreams.... yeah, I know, wishful thinking. If I can't control them though, I may as well control me... and I suppose that's the alternative goal here.
So, KEYWORDS.
The best recorder would still be a sleep journal... until someone can invent a machine that projects our visual thoughts and records them.
So what do you do when you don't have the strength to remain awake to grab the dream journal beside your bed and jot down those details?
As I've experienced this draining types of dreams, I have managed to think of a way of remembering the most important (or emotionally effective) scenes of my dreams before I go crashing back to the sea of my subconscious. Unfortunately, I still haven't found a faster way of recovering the ENTIRE dream... still working on that. Still working on convincing myself, I actually DO want to remember the ENTIRE dream. Yeah, that's the hard part. The emotional scarred me is screaming NO MORE.
Anyway, KEYWORDS! That's right. It's just like remembering a speech. You used keywords to try and remember things that stood out. Example would be of the previous dream posted [Of Trains and Ghosts (Ghost Brides)]
1. VISUALS - try to say out loud anything you can remember you've seen the moment your eyes open.
(ex. strange plants, ghost bride, unknown family and neighbors, old house, wooden house) As you can see the dream was not in that order but the brothers being impaled in those strange plants were what stood out to me the most in the dream
2. AUDIO - try repeating everything you've heard. This is harder compared to the visual.
(ex. camachile tree, crying woman, 'blood suckers') - I was unable to recall the name of the 'blood suckers'. Hard to do when sounds from the waking world affect you as well. A dream once made me feel alone in a bus going nowhere. I cried while asleep listening to 'Stitches and Burns' by Fra Lippo Lippi. I woke up and dad was playing it and I couldn't stop crying
3. SMELL, TASTE and TOUCH - perhaps the hardest of them all are these three hence I grouped them altogether. You don't actually smell anything in the dream, you just think you do. And when someone in the waking world sprays perfume it will affect your dreams as well. Since the nose and the mouth eventually join behind the throat, smell and taste are often correlated so you'll say things like, it tastes like cockroaches, even though you haven't eaten one but may perhaps have smelled one, you know, those flying roaches that land near you and you scream waving your slipper to crush it? Anyway, touch. When someone touches you in the waking world, you feel it in the dream too. A rat once bit me and I dreamt my foot was being scraped with a steel file. I know, it was intense.
So there you go.
Do we need to do this? Not really. It's a personal choice as I believe that dreams are key to how I perceive the world. Honestly, I'm not too happy about my perception if this is it... I want happy dreams... and maybe by mapping these dreams and nightmares I can condition myself to control my dreams.... yeah, I know, wishful thinking. If I can't control them though, I may as well control me... and I suppose that's the alternative goal here.
So, KEYWORDS.
The best recorder would still be a sleep journal... until someone can invent a machine that projects our visual thoughts and records them.
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