One thing that happens as a result of a long-time regular habit of recording your dreams is that you start to notice the reactions and feelings you have both to remembering a dream and to forgetting one.
No longer is it just the dreams that are taking you to the depths, but also the intentional practice of remembering and forgetting.
Someday, I would like to write a much longer article or book on this topic, but for now I’ll share just a few thoughts about how choosing to record my dreams has become a type of spiritual practice. Maybe there’s something about this practice that interests you enough to try it for a few weeks or months yourself.
First of all, what is a spiritual practice? To me, it is a regular, chosen activity one takes on to deepen their conversation and relationship with themselves, nature, others, and/or the Divine. It can be, but does not have to be associated with any religion. It can be tailored to fit your own beliefs, abilities, and capacity. It can be adjusted over time.
I did not take on recording my dreams as a spiritual practice. As I have written before, I started recording my dreams as a young adult with the primary objective of proving I sometimes had dreams about future events. Looking back now, I think there was also a secondary objective of concretizing what I experienced in the dream. It was painful to me how transitory my dream life was and how little attention it got from me or others compared to waking life events and memories. Writing my dreams down in a notebook from time to time across the years of my young adult life satisfied some need in me to be seen for the dreamer I was. She was part of me, too.
I couldn’t have articulated it that way then. It’s only in recent years as I have contemplated the feelings that arise when I don’t write down a dream — and subsequently forget most or all of the details — that I have arrived at the conclusion that remembering my dreams feels like an act of self-love.
I have always been a vivid and active dreamer. I dream many dreams most nights. On average, I would say I remember and write down four dreams each morning, but I have remembered 10 or 20 dreams from the previous night, especially if I am counting the fragments without complete narratives. In many of my dreams, I am interacting with people who feel familiar to me in the dream: a friend, a daughter, a lover, a teacher. I am engaged in an activity I feel some level of attachment or commitment to (ie. I am headed somewhere, seeking someone or something, striving for, giving, receiving, arriving, leaving, etc.) Often times, the dream takes place in an environment that activates my senses and therefore feels very real to me, and I am able to carry that feeling of realness back to waking life reality through memory. The dream has an impact on me. That impact doesn’t simply vanish upon waking.
To wake up, and simply let go or forgo all of those interactions and experiences I had just been engaged in–especially the relationships that felt intimate and deep inside the dream– often felt painful to me. In some cases, I felt grief or suffering from the loss.
In a sense, to forget the dream was to let go of the part of me that participated in it. To remember and write it down, however, was a way to maintain connection to the dream and to the dream Me that lived it. (Practically, remembering and writing down dreams often commits them to long-term memory, which then supports the intention to remember my dream feelings and self, and integrate her into my whole self.)
When I began recording my dreams regularly 12 years ago, I couldn’t ignore the effect dream events and encounters often had on my waking life emotional state the next morning, and sometimes even days after.
Have you ever had the experience of waking up from a dream with a strong feeling? Most of us shake that feeling off pretty quickly. We’re used to forgetting dreams. When I started committing to writing down my dreams each morning, I had a much harder time shaking that feeling off.
For a while, I was what I would call a “dream recording extremist.” I pushed myself to remember and write as many dreams as possible. I was convinced that all of my dreams were of value and had some potential for insight or information. I still hold this as true.
However, I also went through a phase of recognizing the downsides of bringing all those dream feelings into waking life: sometimes I wasn’t up for the additional emotional weight of dreams added to the stressors of my waking life.
It was then I understood just how useful forgetting dreams could be, especially when dreams contained suffering or added worry to my day. I have written before about the “blessings” of a forgotten dream and I still maintain that there are many benefits to our health and well-being in our ability to forget dreams. There are mornings when I work hard to forget a dream precisely because it feels too painful or frightening to remember the details in the moment. When I wake from a frightening dream, I am relieved that my brain works in such a way that the realness of the dream gives way to the realness of the day that follows it.
This is not a prescription to forget painful or frightening dreams. It’s simply acknowledging that both remembering has value and forgetting. It becomes a spiritual practice when we intentionally choose which one today.
Simply in the act of choosing each morning to write down a dream or not to write down a dream, we get to notice what it’s like to hold onto a vivid, profound, intriguing, or even terrifying image and dwell upon it or what it’s like to let go of it, and perhaps, forget it forever.
Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and feel too tired to write a dream down, I find myself sorry about that choice in the morning, especially when I have forgotten the details of the dream but remember a feeling. There are other times in which I have chosen to write down a dream that’s disturbing, but feels relevant to some relational issue I’m working on and so I write it down. Writing it down, however, means I will remember it, and therefore find myself accidentally or on purpose revisiting the disturbing images and resulting feelings. This can be painful. Why do I inflict this pain on myself? I wonder sometimes. The answer, usually, is that to feel is to heal, even when the images and feelings are difficult to be with.
The spiritual practice of remembering or forgetting dreams doesn’t have to be that serious or deep. Sometimes it’s a simple insight. For instance, I notice how I get mad at myself in the morning for not writing down enough details in the middle of the night to remember the dream fully. Or sometimes I notice my frustration at my bodily needs — ie. to use the bathroom — when I would have liked to stay in a pleasure-filled dream longer. Oh, if only I didn’t have physical needs, I think, sometimes: I could savor the feelings longer, or learn something more from the dream.
All of the above are useful to notice; reflecting on these reactions and responses to remembering and forgetting dreams contribute to my learning and growth. They also shed light on how I react and respond to my remembering and forgetting, in general, not just dreams. Now I have more self-awareness of these reactions in me and my responses. They are no longer hidden to me.
I highly recommend this spiritual practice, and would love to hear what you learn for yourself as a result.
