Remembering How to Remember Dreams
We were all born with the power of dreamweaving. Even though dreaming is wired into our nervous systems, as a people we have grown more adept at forgetting than remembering. The truth is that if we are sleeping, then we are dreaming. On average human beings dream 4-7 times each night. However, in my years as a dream teacher, having talked with many hundreds of people about their dreams, I’ve met only a very small handful who regularly remember that number each night.
Instead, most of us have atrophied in our remembering, having become habitual forgetters. We’ve forgotten why we came here, forgotten how to wake up to our purpose, forgotten how to fully live and how to consult the dreams for guidance. But the dreams are always there for us, waiting patiently. When we finally remember to just ask them to, they come and remind us of the vastness that we are. And they usually come with great enthusiasm - the dreams are usually quite excited to return once they know that we are paying them attention.
From time to time, I like to float back on imaginal threads into the life of my ancestors many thousands of years ago. When hanging out with them in their pre-modern time, I often see and feel that the door between the worlds of Dream and Awake were much thinner then, much less established. It’s as though the dream world was more of this world and this was more of the dream world. In those times past, we didn’t have to work as hard at dreaming because like the magical newborns we arrive to this world as, we remained closer to the dreams as they remained closer to us.
These days however, for most of us, there is a clear door between the realm of Dream and the realm of Awake. And that door to Dream tends to slam shut pretty quickly upon awakening, remaining completely closed until the next experience of sleep. Open/Closed, On/Off, Awake/Dream - the modern mind has an allegiance to binaries far more than our ancient ancestors had, if binaries existed for them at all.
People’s incapacity to remember their dreams is often due to this “door slammed shut” feeling that they experience upon awakening. It can feel as though the dreams and their remembrance slips away over the threshold as the dream door closes. This is a very common phenomenon. The trick with increasing our remembrance capacity is to expand our ability to hold a bi-focal awareness, keeping one mental foot in the door of Dream and one mental foot in the door of Awake. Like a muscle that just needs to be strengthened, the job is to expand our ability to hold that mental tension while straddling the threshold.
Our minds and brains are incredibly malleable as the studies of neuroplasticity have shown. Just like a muscle that we are wanting to strengthen by exercising regularly at the gym, we must practice in strengthening the mental muscle to better and better hold the tension of both sides of dream’s door.
This is actually easier than it sounds, I am quite happy to report. Just like that new exercise regimen is always roughest in the first few days and weeks, once the muscles and the inner commitment get on board with and used to the idea - the program grows more and more easeful. Our bi-focal-awareness-dream-door-straddling-muscles simply need to be strengthened, and we do this by trying and by practicing, it’s as simple as that. Most of us are used to a throttle of consciousness with two modes: ON and OFF. So right when we wake up we run out of the door of Dream and straight into the realm of Awake, to-dos, ego.
If our forgetting happens right at that moment of stepping over the dream door threshold, the trick is to practice lingering there around it. Linger as long as you can, without opening the eyes, summoning the inner mental fibers to pull the dreams across with you. And, here is the next important part - write absolutely every little thing that is retained there in the threshold straddle down.
A dream journal is unequivocally essential for carrying dreams across the threshold, creating and sustaining a life informed by dreaming. Sorry guys, don’t blame the messenger - but it really is true. Every dreamer and dream teacher I know agrees on this one - we have to record our dreams. A journal is necessary to reap the numerous other magical outcomes of dreamwork too, such as having a written oracle to and from your own soul, which we will cover in detail as we proceed.
The dream journal is a persuasive declaration to the source of our dreams. By making the effort to obtain a dream journal, leaving it by our bed each and every night, and opening it each and every morning to write in before we get out of bed - we are sending a powerful message to the universe that we are SERIOUS about the dreams! We are so serious that we have a whole notebook of blank pages, just waiting to be filled with the rich and mysterious messages that we are yearning to receive
