March 11, 2022 | LIFE | By Esa George | Illustration by Kira Schulist
If you wait until after waking from a dream-filled slumber to try to remember what happened in your dreams, much of it will have slipped out of your mind.
Piecing together patterns among your dreams rarely happens, for so much of what we dreamt the night before has left us by the time we start our days. Even if you frequently recall a portion of what occurred in a dream, we often brush off the dream’s importance. Dreams are in many ways essential to our existence as humans.
As individuals, we are the only witness to our dream-states, and only we can make the decision, for ourselves, to explore the messages or patterns that the artists of the subconscious have created for us.
At a point in the day when your mind experiences no distractions, because you are sleeping, our subconscious mind is free to utilize all functions of our brains, uninterrupted. For this reason, we should take more consideration in regarding how we react and respond to our dreams. A dream journal may allow individuals to begin their personal journey toward listening to and understanding the narrative of their creative subconscious mind.
Perhaps we need to work on pushing through that awkwardness that comes from having a dream you feel like you are not supposed to have. Diminish that feeling, for the dream served a purpose, as it symbolizes the things that cloud your brain when your mind faces no interruption.
Just how often you think about someone or something special in your subconscious can sometimes feel overwhelming. When you are fully awake and functioning with those same people around you, you may attempt to dispel the memory of the dream involving that person.
The mind that works when you are awake overpowers the subconscious dream-state mind, so this is where the power of a dream journal could benefit us all.
Propping a journal or notebook beside your bed at night could be the final nudge toward your freshly awake, conscious self to take the responsibility of recounting your dreams. It might seem like a big ask, but the benefits outweigh whatever effort it takes. Allowing yourself to process nightly situations, stories, and sagas that only you have ever experienced is a phenomenal service to discover your subconscious mind, the one that has our brain at its full disposal despite the light you hardly ever shine on it.
When you acknowledge that you are in a dream while dreaming, it is because there is often that one element to the dream that is so far – even in a dream-like state – from reality that your conscious, awake self acknowledges the peculiarity, and you cling to that aspect of the dream.
What if you followed those elements of your dreams, wrote them down, and assessed how they could become an escape in your everyday life? The essence of a dream that reminds your dream-selves that “this is not real, you are just dreaming” could be a voice that you can carry into your real lives, for no message that the artists of the subconscious mind produce should be discarded.
You should strive to write down those things that stick out to you while you are asleep, for they could be telling you more about yourself than you think.