We all dream every night. Like most people I don’t remember the vast majority of my dreams. Those I do remember, I mostly remember in fragments. Snatches. What I write of the dreams is often me making sense of what I remember. It is hard to transcribe the absolutely visceral experience of being inside of a dream. A lot of what I write ends up looking like the piece below. Broken bits and pieces that may be interesting in themselves but don’t add up to a whole. Or even a beginning.
The dream:
The boy stared, wide eyed. His gaze darting back and forth between the woman and the picture. It’s not like he’d never seen a picture of a naked woman before. He was fourteen and the internet was a thing. But the woman in the picture was standing right in front of him. That was new.
His uncle folded the picture. “Most people focus on their faces for the self portrait.”
The woman tossed her hair. In a thick accent she answered, “I love my body.” She said it with a casual matter of factness that left the boy flushed with an unfamiliar combination of lust and envy.
Holding the file she’d given him the uncle said, “I’ll go through this and get back to you.”
“You will. My biography is brief, but interesting. As requested.”
***
The uncle and his nephew settled into their seats at the ballet. In an effort to bring in a younger, more diverse crowd they were putting on an original, contemporary work. It was robust, fast paced, and included special effects. The nephew was transfixed. She appeared behind them and flew over an audience that burst into spontaneous applause before realizing that something was horribly wrong.
***
Pictures taken they cut her down and laid her on the stage, her costume of gossamer and feathers fluttering around her showing more life that she ever would again. The uncle smoked a cigarette, his badge hanging from a chain around his neck. He was trying to quit, but what the hell. The boy tried very hard to fade into the background.
End.
When I was little I would talk, and even walk, in my sleep. In second grade I once woke up with my hand on the doorknob to the back door! The first vivid linear dream that I remember occurred when I was eleven. It was a black and white 50s style creature feature complete with opening and ending credits. Decades later I still remember the storyline. The problem is, I don’t have these dreams that often. Maybe a handful a year. Worse, I don’t remember every one. Sometimes I wake up and all I remember are colors or sounds. Since I started trying to write them down a couple of years ago I’ve got a good dozen or so written out but I realized I am going to run out of dreams for Rena’s Web unless I do something.
I started looking into two things. Tips to help remember my dreams and lucid dreaming. When I started this search I had only a vague idea, mostly inspired by the movie Dreamscape, of what lucid dreaming was. When most of us think of lucid dreaming we think of controlling our dreams. But lucid dreaming simply means being aware of the dream while still in the dream. In many cultures dreams are seen as gateways into alternate realities. In these cultures learning to both remember and to control our dreams are important spiritual steps. While I do believe that we are not alone in this universe and that there many planes of existence I don’t know if our dreams take us to any of them. However, these disparate cultures all agree on a few methods for remembering our dreams.
Number one on just about every list for both increasing our ability to remember our dreams and to embark up on lucid dreaming is to have a dream journal. Most recommend having a physical journal to keep by the bedside specifically for recording our dreams. I’ve been using my tablet. I was using the memo function but the amount I was writing kept bumping against the text limit so I switched to the Evernote app. While I prefer to type things out I think a physical journal might be helpful in jotting down notes and key words when I wake during the night and immediately after I wake up in the morning.
Most agree on avoiding alcohol, medications, other drugs, and even eating too close to bed time. So my nightly glass (bottle) of wine is probably not a good idea for yet another reason. Booze and drugs, even the over the counter kind, can affect the brain’s ability to remember, well, anything. They are definitely no help in trying to recall dreams. One thing we can imbibe that might help is vitamin B6. While more research is needed a series of small studies suggest the vitamin may play a role in memory.
Another suggestion for making our spaces dream friendly is aromatherapy. Scent and the mind deserves its own blog post. Scent, memory, and emotion are a powerful combination. The olfactory bulb, our smell processor, starts inside the nose and runs along the bottom of the brain. It has direct connections to the amygdala and hippocampus, part of the limbic system or our lizard brain. The hippocampus is connected to learning and memory. The amygdala influences how we experience emotion and tie those emotions to our memories. This is why smell can affect our mood, our sleep, our physical and mental performance, or whisk us through time with the force of our recollections. This is why making note of smells while dreaming could be a powerful tool for remembering.
Other tools to aid in remembering dreams include many of the things we’ve discussed on MAM Middle Aged Mama the last few post. Meditation, visualization, affirmations- all affect memory in positive ways. All three can put us in the right state of mind to both experience and remember our dreams. Memory works best when we are conscious and relaxed. This alpha state consists of oscillations, or alpha waves, with a frequency of 8 to 13 hertz. The waves are created in the occipital lobe, the area of the brain where visual images like dreams are processed. Besides using meditation, visualization, or mantras to calm the mind and body before bedtime we can also take advantage of the natural condition of being half awake. When we wake in the night, without coming completely alert, focus on any dream images and jot down a few words immediately.
Upon awakening in the morning remain motionless and try to recall any dreams. Stay silently in bed, eyes closed and allow the mind to drift. Remain in the same sleeping position held while dreaming, usually the most comfortable sleeping position. Disturbing this position may jiggle the dream free. Write anything. Even if it is only one word- a color, a feeling, whatever. Even if we cannot remember anything, note so in the journal. This helps to enforce the habit of recording.
When it comes to lucid dreaming I am a bit on the fence. Part of it is my history. Since at least middle school until the early two thousands, well over a decade, I had this recurring stress dream. The dream always took place wherever I was: my bedroom, my boyfriend’s place, a hotel room, wherever. I would wake up in bed and know that there was someone outside of the door. The door was closed but I could see the toes of the large, mud crusted, boots the intruder was wearing. Grabbing some sort of weapon, a tennis racket or baseball bat, I would stalk to the door and fling it open only to find an empty hallway. Scouting out the house or apartment I would find the whole place empty. After checking the locks I would put away my weapon.
I would then go to the bathroom and look in the mirror. It was always here that something would happened to let me know it was a dream. The bathroom would fill with butterflies, the surface of the mirror would turn into a liquid, the floor would drop out from under me and I would suddenly be floating in space. Then I would “wake up” and start it all over again. I would go through the process so many times that when I finally woke up for real it would take me a few minutes to accept that I wasn’t still in the dream.
A few years ago I was telling this dream to someone and he responded that it sounded more like a nightmare. I’d never thought of it as a nightmare because I wasn’t terrified in the dream. There was fear, yes. The idea of an intruder in your home is a scary thing. Mostly, though, I felt the frustration of not being able to escape the dream. A frustration, wariness, and weariness that followed me right into reality. Being aware that I was dreaming, being lucid in the dream, is part of what made the dream so damned maddening.
Then there is the worry I will disrupt the already awesome dreams that I am having. Especially since I often dream in third person. I’m the author or the narrator, and I like it that way. At least a quarter of my dreams are third person, and even the ones that are first person I am often aware that I am not me. It is a rare thing that I am any version of myself in dreams. Something I am sure a therapist would have an opinion or two about.
The good things about learning control in lucid dreaming is the chance to play around with the extraordinary abilities buried in our brains. By thinking about a major problem, an emotional concern, or just reading right before falling asleep we can put the oldest areas of our brains to good use all while we are sleeping. Lucid dreaming can be a source for artistic expression. A way to work through real life issues or practice real life activities – sort of the ultimate in visualization techniques. Mental habits we practice during the day can be reinforced in dreams. One site referred to our dreamscapes as a mental rehearsal stage.
To pursue lucid dreaming the key is to become more aware. Look and listen and pay attention to details. When we see things that don’t fit it is a clue that we are dreaming. Examining our environments or our state of awareness during the day can put us in the habit of doing so in our dreams. This constant monitoring also helps in developing the use of reality checks. Because dreams can be so rich in detail they often feel more real than life. Reality checks generally involve doing something that either shouldn’t work or always works in real life. Using reality checks helps us to stay connected to, well, reality inside and outside of the dream world.
I’m still not sure that controlled lucid dreaming is for me. If it is something that sounds good to you a good way to start along the path is those times when we halfway wake in the night. Jot down what is drifting in your head and slip back into sleep. As reality fades away and you sink into slumber focus on the notes you’ve written and imagine you are back in that place. Remind yourself that this is a dream and maybe you will enter a controlled lucid dream state. If you do manage to have a lucid dream please comment. I’d love to hear about it!