Are there weeks where you remember many dreams, and others where they seem to fade altogether? Have you ever had a dream drought, and what can you do to bring back the flow?
Do dreams naturally ebb and flow over days, weeks, months, or even years, or is it our ability to recall our dreams that fluctuates?
There’s a current discussion going on in the community forum over at The Dream Academy (you can access and participate in the forum if you are enrolled in any of our courses), on this topic. Students are sharing their observations and personal experiences around what’s been going on in their lives when their dreams have eluded them, and what they suggest doing to bring back their rich and full flow. It’s interesting reading, and I won’t repeat any of it here as it’s a confidential forum, but I thought it would make a good general blog topic.
If you’ve been following my work, you’ll know that we all dream, although some conditions such as sleep apnoea, or taking certain medications, or drinking heavily, can reduce dreaming quantity and quality.
For most people, the question is not why dreams ebb, but why our dream recall fades at times.
Scary, emotional, or vivid dreams tend to wake us up, or linger around the edges of the morning light, making them easier to recall. In contrast, we tend to stay asleep after more mundane dreams, or dismiss them too quickly as boring and unhelpful when we finally awake. The moment we start dismissing dreams is the moment we turn down our dream recall dial, the moment we begin to train ourselves to not remember our dreams, to let them fade. It’s an easy trap to fall into.
But don’t be fooled by their humdrum cloaks!
Those mundane or boring dreams can provide deeply insightful material. Encourage them into the light of day and let them speak. They often bring us insight about our routines and habits, what keeps us stuck, or what keeps us from stepping into our greater potential.
Other mundane dreams may reflect periods of time when we feel settled in a good way, not stuck-settled, not settling for second-best, but happily settled with recent issues resolved, feeling good, wanting life to stay like this. With less challenges for our dreaming brains and minds to process, there’s less material to spin into exciting dreams. For a while, anyway! Life soon brings new challenges to the most settled of us: perhaps we decide to venture out, physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually, from our lovely stable settled base, and the moment we do, our dreaming brains and minds get to work processing our new experiences and whipping up more rousing dreams.
The dramatic quality of our dreams may ebb and flow with the challenges we meet in daily life, and our dream recall may fluctuate in the same way unless we make an effort to recall all our dreams, whether they’re high drama, humdrum, or somewhere in-between.
The risk in letting our more mundane dreams slip away, is that our overall dream recall begins to slide.
Honour every dream, no matter the content. The more you honour each and every dream, the more your recall will increase in both quantity and quality.
But how do you honour every dream, especially if you feel time poor? How can you honour every dream when you get to the stage of recalling four or five or more detailed dreams most nights?
While you may still be able to find time to write every dream in your dream journal, an alternative is to find other ways of honouring dreams, ways that still encourage recall. You might like to draw a single symbol from each dream into your dream journal, knowing that each single symbol is a key to help you recall the whole dream. Or you might like to dedicate quiet time to going over your dreams in your mind’s eye while you’re having your shower, having breakfast, or travelling to work. As you become more adept at interpreting your dreams and working with dream alchemy, you’ll discover that you can do this during those dedicated quiet times too. You might then like to record your key insights in your dream journal, or simply choose one dream per week, post-quiet-time-processing, to write out, treasure, and reflect upon in the future.
Here’s a refresher in how to remember more dreams and more dream details, and here’s one on how to record your dreams.
If you’re a student over at The Dream Academy, and you haven’t checked into the community forum for a while, you might like to go and share your experiences with other students there. If you’re not a student, well, perhaps it’s time to enrol!
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