So I almost never remembered my dreams - maybe once every two months
But then I tried a practice to change that, and it's actually almost embarrassing how quickly it worked. Like, within 1-2 weeks. At first just whispy traces and then fully formed scenes. After 38 years of never remembering. Ridiculous.
My dreams have gone from practically zero to practically nightly.
1.
Keep index cards or scraps of paper next to bed. The reason you use cards/papers not a book is so you can throw away any dream that's embarrassing. If you think there'll be a findable record of an embarassing dream, you'll hesitate to write it out, and you MUST write it out
2.
Immediately before you go to sleep, write down "I remember my dreams" on the card/paper. This is just because whatever you think about immediately before sleep often comes into your head when you wake up, so it helps you to remember to remember
3.
The moment you wake up - really, as instantaneously as you wake up - write down anything you can remember about your dream
"But I never have any dreams" - yep so this is the key difference between this and typical dream journal advice. You immediately write down whatever you can remember, which might be "I don't remember anything"
or "I think it was cold?" or "maybe Jack was there?" or "something about runes except maybe that wasn't a dream, it was just the podcast I listened to yesterday". You don't need to make anything up, you can write "I don't remember anything " again and again (so long as you've strained to try and remember and there's really nothing there)
What you are doing is training your brain to understand that this is information you care about. It is ACTIONABLE information. Any data that you immediately take a physical action in response to will be registered as important. (That's why it's better to write it on paper than in your phone)
(You can use this in reverse to tune out annoying sounds. Never react physically or emotionally and your brain eventually decides you don't care about that noise and filters it out of your conscious awareness. Seriously, this is the actual psychological treatment for misophonia, which I have 85% successfully self-administered)
You have to do it every day though.
It's actually a harder ask than it might sound, because it means you have to jolt out of that warm happy drifty half-awake state, so the cost is fairly high, and the benefits fairly low (especially at first before you see any results). The vast majority of my dreams are rehashes of daily events and don't really add any value to my life.
But I figure it's important to keep the channel open so a message CAN get through when the time comes.
This technique comes from page 131 of Six Ways by Aidan Wachter.
He also has a technique for making your dreams more meaningful and magical, involving creating a poppet of yourself and a little bed for it and sigilising it and giving it dream herbs etc etc. Same section of same book.
But then I tried a practice to change that, and it's actually almost embarrassing how quickly it worked. Like, within 1-2 weeks. At first just whispy traces and then fully formed scenes. After 38 years of never remembering. Ridiculous.
My dreams have gone from practically zero to practically nightly.
1.
Keep index cards or scraps of paper next to bed. The reason you use cards/papers not a book is so you can throw away any dream that's embarrassing. If you think there'll be a findable record of an embarassing dream, you'll hesitate to write it out, and you MUST write it out
2.
Immediately before you go to sleep, write down "I remember my dreams" on the card/paper. This is just because whatever you think about immediately before sleep often comes into your head when you wake up, so it helps you to remember to remember
3.
The moment you wake up - really, as instantaneously as you wake up - write down anything you can remember about your dream
"But I never have any dreams" - yep so this is the key difference between this and typical dream journal advice. You immediately write down whatever you can remember, which might be "I don't remember anything"
or "I think it was cold?" or "maybe Jack was there?" or "something about runes except maybe that wasn't a dream, it was just the podcast I listened to yesterday". You don't need to make anything up, you can write "I don't remember anything " again and again (so long as you've strained to try and remember and there's really nothing there)
What you are doing is training your brain to understand that this is information you care about. It is ACTIONABLE information. Any data that you immediately take a physical action in response to will be registered as important. (That's why it's better to write it on paper than in your phone)
(You can use this in reverse to tune out annoying sounds. Never react physically or emotionally and your brain eventually decides you don't care about that noise and filters it out of your conscious awareness. Seriously, this is the actual psychological treatment for misophonia, which I have 85% successfully self-administered)
You have to do it every day though.
It's actually a harder ask than it might sound, because it means you have to jolt out of that warm happy drifty half-awake state, so the cost is fairly high, and the benefits fairly low (especially at first before you see any results). The vast majority of my dreams are rehashes of daily events and don't really add any value to my life.
But I figure it's important to keep the channel open so a message CAN get through when the time comes.
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This technique comes from page 131 of Six Ways by Aidan Wachter.
He also has a technique for making your dreams more meaningful and magical, involving creating a poppet of yourself and a little bed for it and sigilising it and giving it dream herbs etc etc. Same section of same book.
