How to remember and
how to record your dreams

Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson
Extract from DREAM ALCHEMY by Jane Teresa Anderson, pub 2003

Everybody dreams. If you let someone sleep but prevent them from dreaming, they suffer extreme physical and mental symptoms. Dreams, whether you remember them or not, keep you sane. But when you do remember them, interpret them and act on them, they also provide you with life changing insight and capabilities. So how can you remember your dreams?

The most common reasons for bad dream-recall include:

• Your parents soothed your nightmares by telling you they were 'only dreams' so you learned not to bother remembering them.

• You have blocked dream recall because you had a series of scary dreams.

• You jump out of bed in the morning when the alarm goes off, jumping straight into your conscious world - not giving yourself time to bask in the twilight zone and remember your dreams.

• Deep down you don't want to look at, let alone change, anything about your life.

To remember your dreams:

• Tell yourself your dreams are important. Buy an exercise book or another special book to use as your dream journal and expect to remember your dreams.

• Keep paper and pen by your bed and jot down a couple of words of the dream you have had as a memory jogger to read in the morning. Or keep a tape recorder by your bed to record your dream in the middle of the night.

• When you wake up in the morning, lie in the position you usually dream in. Your body muscles hold memories of your dream so lying in the same position often triggers your memory.

• Set two alarm clocks. Set the second one for the time you must get out of bed. Set the first one for about twenty minutes before. When your first alarm goes off, lay in your dreaming position and float along in the twilight zone. Banish any thoughts about the day. Think of the first alarm clock as waking you up to your dreams and the second alarm clock as waking you up to your day.

• Write something in your dream journal every day, even if you can't remember a dream. Write about your waking feelings. These are often a hangover from the feelings in your dream, so writing about these gradually triggers your dream recall over several weeks.

• Read DREAM ALCHEMY (or the huge resources on this website). Reading about dreams is likely to bring back your dream memory because it emphasises the importance of your dreams.

How to record your dreams:

To get the most benefit from interpreting your dreams you will need to write them down. Buy yourself a book with blank pages. Make it a special book, something to treasure. This is your dream journal.

Use the right hand pages to record your dreams. Start with the date and then choose a title for each dream. Write your dream exactly as you remember it. Use the first words that come into your head. You will discover that these first words are a major key to interpretation. Don't be tempted to edit or choose better words. Your unconscious came up with the dream - stick with the language it chose! If you misspell a word, don't correct it. This mistake will also be a key to your dream interpretation. Add in as many feelings as you can remember from your dream, as they too are keys to your interpretation.

Divide the left hand pages into two columns. Use one column to write your dream interpretations. Use the other column to record notes about what happened during the day: your feelings, questions, problems and insights, as these can help you to identify the situations your dreams may be processing and addressing.

At the back of your dream journal keep a few pages to use as an index. Each day write the date and then the titles of all your dreams for that night under the date. When you need to look back for a particular dream you will be able to scan the titles and access the dream quickly. The date will give you an idea of where it is in your book.

As your dreams are in date order they will be easy to find, but if you really want to be efficient you can number the pages of your dream journal and write the page numbers by your dream titles.

Your dream titles also act as memory joggers. Every six weeks look through your index, reading the titles of your dreams for the last six weeks. This review can help you to identify cycles of recurring dreams or to see your patterns of breakthrough or progress.

You might prefer to keep an e-journal. If you're comfortable with keyboards and computers this saves you from writing longhand and enables you to search back through your dreams for similar themes or symbols. An excellent e-dream journal is available through our website shop here.

As well as recording your dreams, you might like to buy two smaller exercise books to use for your dream alchemy practices. Use one to keep a copy of your visualisations and affirmations (one on each page) so that you can follow them or read them out loud from your book and also look back in months to come and see how successful you've been. Use the other to record any written dream alchemy practices and to keep notes on your progress and insights.

Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson
Extract from DREAM ALCHEMY by Jane Teresa Anderson, pub 2003

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