If you are someone who has a regular practice of writing down your dreams upon waking, you probably have noticed that the You who writes down the dream has better recall of the dream than the You eight hours later does, after a busy day of whatever it is you are busy with during the day: work, school, parenting, travel, volunteering, or just general life navigation or mere survival.
After many years of recording my dreams on a daily basis, I’ve noticed there is more than just a small difference between the Me who writes the dream and the Me who reads it later.
The Me I am upon waking from a dream feels different than the Me later in the day feels. In fact, the more attention I have given to my dreams over the years the more significant the difference between the two.
Dreams and dreaming, in general, give us access to different versions of ourselves, and a chance to experience life differently as a result. In fact, I wrote recently about the idea that dreams allow us to experience life outside of ourselves, even, and inside the point-of-view of someone not “You.” (If we allow them to.)
But now I want you to think of the You who writes the dream in the morning; the you who remembers the vivid dream.
Take a moment now before continuing to read the rest of this article, and really remember that moment of waking up from a dream. Close your eyes and try to inhabit that you, by which I mean try to relax and remember what it felt like to be in bed, in the dark, still a little sleepy, with a memory of a dream. Perhaps, it’s this morning’s dream because it was a powerful one that stayed with you longer than the average dream does. Or maybe you’re recalling an early morning last week when you woke up screaming for help as a result of a vivid nightmare.
It’s up to you and all you need to do is to settle on a memory of a post-dream You, relax for a few minutes, and try to remember with your senses how it felt to be that version of You. If you have breathing techniques or relaxation techniques that work for you, you can incorporate those. Once you feel a little relaxed, try to recall one element from the dream that’s still vivid, or still feels fresh or still stirs in you a strong feeling, even if that feeling is a little duller now than it was when you woke. For this first time, you might choose a more pleasant image, a juicy one, that left you feeling joyful or youthful or excited.Â
After you’ve spent a few minutes doing this, come back to read the rest of the article. (Note: You can spend as much time there as you like or need, but I would recommend a minimum of five minutes.)
Ok. So now you’re back.Â
If you’ve done the above — at least made an attempt — what you’ve just done is changed your state of awareness. It’s that simple. Closing your eyes and trying to re-enter a strong dream image or feel the way you did upon awakening from a dream is a simple way to get closer to that state than when you were alert, eyes open wide, reading the words on the page, and trying to understand and process them.
It’s an exercise worth doing for anyone, even those less interested in examining the existential questions of dreaming, consciousness, and reality.Â
Dropping into that state for just a few minutes allows you access to a deeper version of your self, a version more connected to your soul than your mind or body.
When you get better at dropping into that state — a receptive state — you can go even deeper and be able to access “messages” (specifically, images, feelings, and inner knowledge) that your soul / higher self hopes you receive or that you wish to receive from your soul / higher self.
You may also receive images, feelings, and knowledge from outside you — otherwise known as “claircognizant” impressions. Claircognizance (“clear knowing,”) is a type of extrasensory awareness of information that has not been perceived directly by you with your five senses. (You can read more about dreamwork as training ground for telepathy here.)
In a practical sense, what’s happening in that moment you close your eyes and drop into being the You you were just upon waking from a dream, is that you are shutting down the parts of your brain geared toward sensory and information processing and instead engaging the parts of your brain geared toward relaxing and receiving intuition, feelings, and higher wisdom.
Mystical traditions have been teaching us this for thousands of years and in modern time, science is verifying that the two hemispheres of our brain have distinct and specialized roles. In my own personal and direct experience, when certain areas of my left brain are turned off and the right brain is more engaged (for me, during sleep, dreaming, napping, focused prayer, or trance-like states while awake), I am able to receive images, inner wisdom, and loving guidance from a “Me” I cannot so easily access when I am awake, alert, active, and busy.
Some people are able to access this other version of themselves through deep meditation, guided visualization, or self-hypnosis. I find that it’s easier for me to access that state in dreams, hypnogogia (the liminal state between sleep and awake), self-induced trance, and dreamwork.
The above method is basically a kind of light dreamwork.Â
When I am working with a dreamer in a dreamwork session, we are — depending on the skill and desire of the dreamer — trying to re-enter a dream-like state. This takes some time and practice. Most of all it requires a willingness to put aside an hour of your day toward being in that more relaxed, receptive, intuitive, feeling state in which higher wisdom or loving guidance can arise to awareness.
One of the main reasons why I don’t do analytical or interpretive dreamwork is because I believe one of the most significant roles of dreamwork is to teach the dreamer how to return to these precious states of awareness while awake. We can learn — over time and with practice– how to do this.
When I am engaged with dreamers in dreamwork sessions, I am also trying to help them tune into the difference between their own individual hyper-alert and active state of mind, compared to their own quieter state of feeling and receiving. How do the two states differ for you? How does it feel to be in one state compared to the other? How do you like the You in one state compared to the other? How does the one You get along with people compared to the other?
Tuning into how you feel upon waking from a vivid dream and comparing that to how you feel standing in a long line at the grocery store is a good way to just start noticing that there is, in fact, a difference between the “You who writes the dream” and the “You who reads the dream.”
If you are someone who regularly records your dreams, you probably have had the experience of returning to read the dream later and either not remembering the dream at all or remembering very little, often lacking the vivid recall you must have had upon waking (because how else would you have written all those details down?!?)
It can be a bit jarring or frustrating, right? Who was that person who remembered experiencing such an in-depth dream? How can it have happened to me and yet I don’t remember it at all?
If you are someone who works with a dreamwork practitioner, this can be even more frustrating when you want to explore that dream, but feel like you can’t visualize a single detail. It can sometimes even feel as if someone else must have written the words of the dream down because nothing — not a single thing — is coming back to you.
Sometimes your waking active self is so shut off from that relaxed and receptive state of awareness that it’s near impossible to access those dream images. That’s why with dreamwork, we tend to work with dreams in which there is some recall, rather than none. It’s also why I recommend to dreamers who want to remember more dreams, to write down whatever they do remember. Remembering even a little bit of a dream perception (ie. seeing someone or hearing something) can return us to that receptive state in which more images can enter.
Even when you cannot remember a single detail from a dream, the You who dreamed the dream is not gone. And theoretically, one could access that forgotten dream with some professional support or guidance through, let’s say, hypnosis. But even on our own, we can try to get better at recalling hard-to-remember dreams by taking the time to close our eyes, settle our bodies, and quiet our minds. Rather than struggle to remember a particular dream or dream detail (which is an active state as opposed to a receptive state), we can instead let go and be willing to receive whatever arises. We can simply intend to return to a dream-like awareness (using the exercise above), with a trust that whatever arises when we do is the image, feeling, or knowing that is most beneficial to us in that moment. We can do this inside the container of a dreamwork session or we can do that alone in a cozy chair in our home or in our beds before napping.
I have found this state to offer so much in the ways of learning and growth, as well as providing me with images and experiences that feel so magical, wondrous, and mysterious that I continue to seek this state out myself on a regular basis and help others cultivate it.Â
On auto-pilot, I find I typically exert the most energy as the Me who is alert and active (the Me who reads the dream), and of course, this benefits me in a variety of ways; primarily, doing so keeps me alive, fed, clothed, clean, etc.
However, I have come to understand and appreciate the Me who writes the dream as a Me who has more access to soul, love, awe, and higher wisdom. She’s a deeper Me I am trying to get to know better, and learn how to communicate with from here.
