Because learning about your brain and sleep can be fun . . .
In a previous post, I compared several weeks of my dream journal to Blue Opossum’s. He responded to the April 12 blog post by e-mail. Blue Opossum is a metacognitive dreamer. He’s aware of a whole lot of his dreams, far more than most people. There are misconceptions in your post, but that is to…
Understanding yourself better using your dream journal (Part 6/7) Blue Opossum (a pseudonym) is a K-12 educator from Australia. He has an incredibly detailed recall of his dreams and a heightened awareness of the different stages of sleep. He’s got a real gift. Born in 1960, his dream journal, for practical purposes, starts in 1963…
The how and why of understanding yourself better using your dream journal (Part 5/7) Don’t compare yourself to others. Be yourself. Compare yourself to yourself. These ideas find their way into all kinds of creative expressions. There’s a big reason it’s on so many minds. Creators are creative people. Each has a spark or many…
Part 3/7 Everyone, no matter how young or old they are, has dreams. They also have other people in their life, people who might not understand their dreams the way they do. They can’t. No matter how close you are to someone, your experiences and their experiences are different. You’re two different people after all.…
—Part 2/7 Without a written record, dreams are quickly forgotten, often as soon as an hour of waking up. There is no good way to remember your dreams without a written dream journal, preferably on paper. With paper, you can draw. You can write notes in the margins. It’s far more flexible. Understanding the dream…
In Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol, the old, miserly protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge confronts his nightmares and emerges a better man. Dickens describes him as greedy, ill-tempered, and grasping. Scrooge, at least, is good in that he becomes a better person by the end of the story. Dream journalers sometimes have nightmares so unsettling they don’t…
Make sure your dream journal is ready for writing every night. Your dream journaling hobby needs to be a habit. When it’s a habit, it’s at its most powerful. We spend one-third of the day sleeping or in bed. One-third of the day, every day, adds up to a long time. That’s a lot of…
What were you doing in the dream? Fighting, I don’t know. I don’t remember it well. Maybe there’s a puzzling line or two a character spoke in the dream. “Hopa, hopa!” What does that even mean? What makes a faded dream? A memory is formed in your brain by linking it to other memories. For…
What happens if you’re going to be away from home, and you don’t want to risk losing your journal or worry about leaving it behind? An index card can work as an alternate dream journal, ready to be inserted into your regular journal until you have time to write it down in your regular journal.…
Why did I do that? Why did it all turn out that way? Knowing what I know now, what would I tell my younger self? You look back at your decisions. Some you judge to have been good, others bad. It’s easier when a few years have passed. The emotions have dimmed, if only a…