Breaking a dream drought

Breaking a dream drought

Make sure your intention will be one that motivates and inspires you. Do not make dream recall a chore to fit in with all the others.

by Robert Moss — 

Have you lost touch with your dreams? Are your dreams missing you (in the words of one of a new slew of dream-themed TV commercials)? Is your recall limited to fragments that are lost completely as you hurry off into the business and traffic of the day?

The following are easy ways to renew and refresh your relationship with your dreams.

1. Set an intention for the night. Before you go to bed, write down an intention for the night. This can be a travel plan: I would like to go to Hawaii or visit my family. It might be a specific request for guidance: I want to know what will happen if I change my job. It could be a more general setting of direction: I ask for healing, or you might simply say: I want to have fun in my dreams and remember them upon waking.

Make sure your intention will be one that motivates and inspires you. Do not make dream recall a chore to fit in with all the others.

Having set your intention, make sure you have the means to honor it. Keep pen and paper or a tape recorder next to your bed so you are ready to record something when you wake up, even if it is at 3 a.m. Sometimes the dreams we most need to hear visit us during rather solitary or seemingly inconvenient times.

If you do not remember a dream when you first wake up, rest for a few minutes and see if you recall something. Sometimes returning to the body posture you were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what you were dreaming.

If you still do not have a dream, write something down anyway — whatever is in your awareness, including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream, even if the dream itself is gone. And as you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams, “I am listening. Talk to me.”

2. Practice conscious entry into the dreamscape. You do not need to go to sleep in order to dream. You can enter dreaming from a quiet place of meditation, from the twilight zone between sleep and waking, or through shamanic drumming. You can take a favorite picture and use it as a personal dream gate. Try imagining yourself stepping behind that line of trees in the landscape painting and having an adventure on the other side. Or take a favorite piece of music and let yourself flow with it into a series of dream-like scenes.

3. Play with the dream-like symbols of everyday life. It is fun to devote a little time every day to track the dream-like play of symbols. It is also very interesting how, when we give more room to studying coincidence and random messages (in the vanity plate of the car ahead or what comes on the car radio, for instance), we seem to unlock the nocturnal dream gates, and more symbols come through.

4. Be kind to fragments. Do not give up on fragments from your night dreams. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with. You may find you are pulling back more of the previously forgotten dream.

Robert Moss is the author of Dreaming the Soul Back Home and books about dreaming, shamanism and imagination. He learned the ways of a traditional dreaming people from the Aborigines. mossdreams.com.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 34, Number 5, October/November 2015.