These days, psychologists tend to see dreams as just one psychological phenomenon among others. Time was, however, when dreams were considered the royal road to the unconscious: the primary and most direct way of learning about the unconscious. The psychoanalyst James Fosshage (1983) describes dreams as having “the superordinate function [of] the development, maintenance (regulation), and, when necessary, restoration of psychic processes, structures, and organization” (p. 262). They are a crucial part of our psychological ecosystem, and developing a relationship with our dream life can immensely enrich and enliven our life.
Dreams have also long been recognized not just as psychological phenomenon, but also as sources of divine communication or as having magical import. In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung (1964) remarked that “We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions” (p. 92). Among contemporary magical practitioners, Donald Michael Kraig, in Modern Magic, writes, “as part of your work as a magician, it is important to keep a record of your practices, experiences, thoughts, and dreams… Starting right now, today, you should start keeping a diary of your dreams.”
To be able to work with dreams, whether psychologically or magically, requires building a relationship with them. Many people are alienated from their dream life. Their dreams are like wild animals that bolt and disappear into the recesses of the wilderness of their psyche almost as soon as they are spotted. Some people even go so far as to say that they do not dream. I doubt very much whether this claim is ever accurate, since I tend toward the position that dream is the default state of waking matter. More likely, various factors conspire to keep dreams hidden in the liminal, underworld places that incubate and animate them. So, in this post, as a preliminary to future posts on dreams, I would like to spell out seven practical suggestions for how to cultivate a relationship with your dreams so as to improve dream recall.
The first, most critical recommendation for remembering your dreams is to get enough high quality sleep. Insufficient sleep and sleep fragmentation can contribute to a lack of REM sleep (the stage of sleep in which most dreaming occurs) and poor memory consolidation. Sleep hygiene is therefore paramount. It is best to only use your bed for sleeping and sex. If you read or scroll through social media on your phone in bed, your mind will solidify an association between activity, alertness, and the bed, and your sleep may be negatively impacted. Keeping a regular sleep schedule can also help, so that your circadian rhythm is consistent and unstressed. Alcohol and many recreational drugs can disrupt and fragment sleep and memory consolidation, and for most people disrupt the dream recall process.
The second recommendation for remembering your dreams is to begin to keep a dream journal. Having a physical journal and special pen obtained with the express purpose recording your dreams is best. You can use your phone or computer, but these tools are not dedicated to the purpose, and to start out it can enhance your dream practice to not disperse your dreams into the digital realm. In any case, having a clear intention and dedicated implements can bring focus to your psyche.
This leads directly to the third recommendation, which is to explicitly set an intention to remember your dreams. At bedtime each night, just before you go to sleep, speak to yourself out loud, stating your intention to remember your dreams that night. Using this technique has been very powerful for me, and has allowed me to remember thousands of dreams over a decade of dream journaling. When I started, I hardly ever remembered my dreams, and now I frequently remember more than one each night, sometimes as many as five or six dreams in a single night.
The specific words you choose for your intention are less important than your conviction and clarity of intention, and so feel free to adapt your own version. Mine has adapted over the years, but what I say is: “Hi, ego. Please help me remember my dreams and write them down when I awaken.” Let’s break this down. First, I am addressing my ego, the part of my psyche that has day consciousness and that is responsible for rational functioning, in effect recruiting it to ally with the irrational, unconscious parts of my mind rather than relegate them to forgetting. Second, I include the specific intentions to remember and to write down the dreams. I have found that if I remember them in the morning but don’t write them down right away, dreams will fade and disappear, and so I include both parts in the intention. Third, I state “when I awaken” rather than “in the morning” so that the intention will encompass dreams remembered from when I wake in the middle of the night, which happens more and more as I age.
The fourth recommendation is meditation before bed. I meditate each morning, but I have found that the extent, volume, and specificity of my dream recall significantly improves with just five or ten minutes of meditation shortly before bed.
The fifth recommendation is to sleep with symbolic objects pertinent to dreaming or spiritual matters under your pillow or at your bedside table. Tarot cards (e.g., The Magician, High Priestess, or Hierophant), stones (e.g., moonstone, amethyst), sachets of herbs (e.g., mugwort), and similar items can set an atmosphere and provide a concrete symbolic link to help foreground your intention to remember your dreams.
The sixth recommendation is to use oneirogens, or substances ingested to augment dream recall. Please do your research before taking any herb or supplement, and remember that this is not medical advice! Over the counter pharmaceutical oneirogens include B vitamins, 5-HTP, and choline. I have personally found that taking a B vitamin complex just before bed significantly enhances dream recall. Naturally occurring oneirogenic herbs that can augment dream recall, include:
- Artemesa vulgaris (mugwort);
- Silene capensis (Africa dream root);
- Celastrus paniculatus (intellect tree);
- Lactuca virosa (wild lettuce—very bitter!);
- Nymphaea caerula (blue lotus);
- Asparagus lucidus (wild asparagus root);
- Tagetes lucida (Mexican tarragon).
Please use caution and do your research into the medical properties and cultural contexts of any herb before you use it in your own practice!
The seventh recommendation is to use rituals to dedicate your tools (journal and pen) to the intention to remember and record your dreams. Such rituals can augment this link in your mind, and help solidify an intention to record your dreams. If you have an active ancestor veneration practice, it can be helpful to make explicit requests for them to provide you with communication in dreams, if you have developed a relationship with them that supports such petitions. From a planetary perspective, Henry Cornelius Agrippa gives instructions for astrological talismans for dreaming using a variety of planetary images: the Sun, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, and the Moon. Dreaming is a complex phenomenon, and so it is not surprising that different perspectives can be taken on how to approach dreaming. There’s room here for you to get creative. Astrologically speaking, dreaming is associated with the ninth house, which is where the Sun rejoices, and so solar petitions can be helpful (although you might more naturally associate dreaming with the night and hence with the Moon, remember here that you’re trying to bring dreams out into the light of consciousness, hence the solar association). So far as Mercury is concerned, one might also considering calling upon Hermes in their role as psychopomp to provide knowledge of the underworld nature of dreams (you can use the Orphic hymn to Hermes Kthonios for this purpose).
The eighth recommendation is that with your dream journal, you must use it in a disciplined way to increase its effectiveness, and you must train your mind to build up descriptive richness. Working with dreams requires remembering them in as much specificity as possible. For example, the symbolic potential of “I dreamt of an animal” is minimal due to its vagueness, whereas “I dreamt of an unusually large iridescent blue beetle with twelve legs and shimmering wings” carries much more potential for unveiling personal and archetypal associations. To help with this, write down everything you remember of every dream, even if it seems mundane or trivial, without judgment. Even if it’s only a word or an image, write it down. You are building a muscle, metaphorically speaking, and it is important not to let any dream, no matter how small or insignificant, pass through your net.
Remember, you are building a relationship with your dream life. Invite all dreams in equally and treat each dream as if it was a special creature that you were seeing for the first time. Just as in a forest, certain creatures like squirrels and sparrows will show up for almost anyone whereas other creatures like deer or foxes are more shy, so too some dreams are less amenable to showing up to your day consciousness. You must build trust and relationship with the dream ecosystem, and one way to do this is to respect each dream. As you do so, you will find your capacity to see visit more of the dreamscape will grow over time. On this point, do not ignore or neglect bad dreams. It’s okay, of course, to steer clear of traumatic dreams However, I have found that by treating non-traumatic nightmares as just another constituent of my psyche like any other, they disturb me less and I am able to be curious about rather than rejecting of them.
Hopefully these recommendations will help spur you forward in your journey into dream. Feel free to let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed that works particularly well for you!
References
Fosshage, J. (1983). The psychological function of dreams: A revised psychoanalytic perspective. In M. Lansky (Ed.), The essential papers on dreams. New York: New York Universities Press
Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Dell Publishing.