3 Easy Steps to Record Your Dreams
Why record dreams?
In previous articles I have mentioned ways of shining the light on your unconscious by learning to focus on your body, thinking, emotions and behaviours. Another way is to journal and record what you are noticing. If you want to take this to a deeper level, then recording your dreams to work with is in order.
You might think that this is a bit strange to focus on dreams, because it is not something you can control. Exactly. That means it is out of conscious control and in the realm of the unconscious. Freud wrote that ‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities on the mind’ (Freud in Storr 2001:46). Jung (2001:11) stated that ‘almost half of our lives is passed in a more or less unconscious state. The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious’.
Three easy steps
So how do you go about capturing your dreams in a way that you can work with them in therapy? Like a gardener preparing the soil for the seeds, there are steps that help to record what you have dreamt.
Firstly, put your journal and a pen/pencil next to your bed. You might like to have a light easily available if you wake up in the middle of the night and you want to jot down some notes. A torch can be helpful. Make a statement before you go to sleep, that you are interested and want to record your dreams. You are open to what you might dream.
Secondly when you wake, stay still. Moving your body often causes dreams to evaporate. Go over every bit of your dream you can remember. Pay attention to names, numbers, colours, shapes, location, people around or not, and how you feel. Often this will help your recall and you will remember more than you did when you just woke up.
Thirdly, open your journal and start writing down everything you can recall. Make sure you give your dream a title. To help bring the dream more firmly into your consciousness, you can draw a sketch of your dream. For example, you might draw a location (eg a bus) then both where other people are standing in the dream and where you are. At the end, pause and consider have you collected all the fragments you can? Consider your overall emotion: are you happy or angry or frightened?
You are then ready to work on your dream in your therapy session, to deepen your unconscious message.
Jung C G (2001) Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Routledge Classics: Abingdon, Oxon.
Storr A (2001) Freud. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press: Oxford. [Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 608).
