Recording your dreams

Four Seasons, Langkawi

“Dreams, visions and feeling – so entirely inner and mine – have nothing to do with the soul unless they be recollected, recorded, entered into history. Inner images and feelings (so-called soul-stuff) are free from grabs, nightly at the onerific fair, simply giveaways from the tunnel of love and the chamber of horrors unless they be put through the qualifying intelligence, the history-making of the psyche, sifted and weighed in the disciplined reflection of loving, of ritual, of dialectics, of an art – or of a psychological analysis with its therapeutic plot”. (Hillman: The Dream and the Underworld)

Throughout history, human beings have known intuitively that our dreams provide access to another dimension of our being and that there is great value in being able to understand them.

Depth psychologists, such as Jungian psychoanalysts, work with dreams as a means of relating to the unconscious. Free from the influence of either client or analyst, they provide a reliable guide on a person’s journey.

Recording dreams is important and requires discipline and commitment.

Jungian psychotherapist, Cheryl Fuller, has produced a useful handout with tips on how to record your dreams.

She gives advice on everything from what to do before you go to sleep, to keeping a dream journal.

Here, for example, is the second point of her advice, which deals with what to do when you wake up:

Don’t jump right out of bed when you wake up. Lie still with your eyes closed and remember where you just were – a dream is an experience and so feels like having been someplace else. Even if all you can recall is a tiny fragment, a single image, write it down. Before you forget anything, write down as much detail as you can remember. Write in the present tense, because dreams are about our current emotional situation. Often you will find yourself remembering more as you write.

Here are 4 key questions to keep in mind when you write your dream:

  • What was the key image in the dream?
  • What was the key feeling?
  • Where was the dream located?
  • What situation in my waking life does this dream remind me of?

These four questions will help identify the dream’s meaning, and will help you recall the dream later in the day, when you have more time to reflect upon it, in a clear-headed state. Another goal of writing four sentences is that it helps keep your journal entry brief, and thus easier to faithfully record. (It can be tough to write in the morning—before we’ve had our coffee!)

Fuller reminds us to “be playful, patient and persistent” in trying to recall our dreams. It takes time for the practice to develop.

To download a copy of the handout click here

If you are interested in analysing your dreams and would like to work with a Jungian psychoanalyst in London please click here.

 

 

Posted on

Comments are closed.