Have you ever woken up from a dream and tried to remember it, only to have it slip back into the recesses of your memory?
Over the years, I have kept many dream journals and consider recording and journaling dreams to be a potent way to connect with the unconscious mind. Another way to say “unconscious mind” is to say “body.” I like to say: the mind is subtle body and the body is denser mind.
Dreaming, active imagination and visualization are activities associated with the right brain, while language and analyses are associated with the left brain.
I personally don’t like to “analyze” dreams, or equate dream symbols with specific, definite interpretations. Analyzing dreams often reduces powerful archetypes and psychic forces and relegates them to left brain reason.
Another option for working with dreams is to consider them poems or paintings…works of psychic art if you will.
I will often journal my dreams in the form of haiku poetry so that I remember the images.
The image itself can be revealing and illuminating.
One summer in 1992 while living on the coast of North Carolina, I discovered a very unique method for remembering dreams quite by accident. It was my morning habit that summer to take an ocean swim before beginning my day.
One morning as I walked to the beach I tried in vain to recall a powerful dream I had the night before. I could not remember the dream and I was frustrated.
As I entered the warm ocean salt water, I began to float on my back. As I did so, once my ears were submerged, the images from last night’s dream came streaming again through my mind’s eye. I was pleasantly surprised by how easily my dream returned to my conscious mind once my ears were submerged in water.
I repeated my experiment every time I forgot a dream, and every time I floated on my back and submerged my ears in water I could remember the images.
I have since done this technique in the bath as well and it never seems to fail! So if you don’t live near the ocean, or have a pool, try using the bathtub to remember your dreams. Simply submerge your ears in water, close your eyes and breathe slowly and let the dream return.
I suspect that submerging the ears in water cuts out ambient noise and puts the brain in a relaxed state that is similar to sleeping. Matcha also puts the brain in a relaxed state, alpha state, because of the theanine. I use matcha to meditate with and I have noticed that matcha facilitates dreaming and visualization techniques.