Dream Catching

Many of us regard our dreams as no more than nightly flights of fantasy, having no practical use in our lives. But perhaps you have not considered that everything we see around us is the product of dreams made real and put to practical use. In fact, all the things we see around us is the product of the merging of many dreams by many imaginative people throughout history.

The concept is really quite astounding when we view dreams from this perspective. We tend to think we have a fairly good grasp on reality. Considering we have established that everything is the product of dreams, how can we relate to reality without understanding our dreams?

The products of our creativity are bound within dreams and we owe it to ourselves, if not the world, to understand them. But our dreams could be clues to something much more astounding. But how do we piece the dreams together?

Our dreams can be somewhat elusive. It is believed that we all dream, yet we may not remember them upon waking. This is due to a fascinating trick of the mind. Simply speaking, the part of the brain where dreams come from does not speak the same language as the part that holds our waking consciousness.

Some have argued we do not dream in color or even hear the sound in our dreams. But others argue that none of what we would call a dream is remotely discernible from its source.

Our conscious mind gradually begins to regain control of our perception from our subconscious mind before we awaken. The raw material of our dream is translated into a format we can somewhat decipher during this brief transfer. For this reason, a dream only teeters on the periphery of our short term memory. If we don’t concentrate on remembering, it is gone in an instant from our perceptual memory.

But, this is not to suggest it cannot be recovered. Keeping a dream journal can help us retrieve the dream even if we do not think we had one during the night.

True dream journaling is not just about documenting the dreams we remember having. It is a process of retrieving and placing our dreams into context. A dream journal can be used to retrieve the memory of our dream by using keywords that pop into our mind moments after we awaken.

You should date and document these keywords moments after waking even if all you have are the keywords. Some have reported seeing a startling pattern emerge from their long-term journal entries. There are peculiar aspects of dreams that suggest they are much more than mere byproducts of our conscious observations. Some examples include seeing our faces blurred in mirrors, being called or referred to by a name other than ourselves and even experiencing the perception of being another gender.

Perhaps, the most startling aspect of dream journaling is that many claim they were able to find who they once were in a past life.