How can I dream more? First off, you already dream every day, and in an hour and a half increments and you can, with some practice, take 20 minute naps and get little micro sleep, REM dream, awesome sauce nap, power naps. But, most people say, I don’t dream anymore, or I can’t remember my dreams, which is a more accurate statement.
Every REM cycle you have a barrage of dreams, and sometimes they can stack on top of each other so many, or in such a fashion to where it can be hard to recall, or especially if you wake up mid cycle it just seems to wipe away the whole experience, but, guarantee you do dream, and there’s a way to dream more.
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The first approach is to realize that what you already dream is there. It’s a realization of, an awareness of what’s there will make it seem like you dream more because you can actually remember it.
One of the best approaches to this is one; make sure you’re sleeping in overall chucks of sleep that are conducive to the one-and-a-half hour complete sleep cycle. So, aim for six hours, or seven-and-a-half instead of five-and-a-half. It depends for each person, but those are the good average numbers that have been passed around and backed up by science.
Try not to purposely land on six-and-a-half hours, or five-and-a-half hours every time. It may work for you, you may eventually get use to it, but you could be cutting the cycle short and missing out some opportunities for recall there.
Another useful exercise to bring up your awareness in getting into the habit of recalling your dreams is to upon waking, to the best of your ability, get at least one or two sentences out that summarize your dreams. This is just a start, and a summary gets you focused on getting something out quickly to pen, or paper, or the recording feature of your phone, and gets you in the habit of doing that every day when you wake up. That alone will build up the want to recall your dreams, and there’s some magic that happens there to where it becomes easier.
Now, if you really want to have a finer fidelity of recall, and details of your dream that’s where you dip into the more advanced method that comes after several weeks of practice of becoming more aware, and that’s where you go through your dream, and without using any heuristics [?], describe what your dream was about.
And what I mean by that is, don’t say, I went to Walmart in my sports car to pick up a DVD player. Instead, you’re saying, I went out to the garage and stepped into this vehicle that’s this color, this shape, had these kinds of feelings, and used it to travel over to the store, and then I noticed some squares along the way, or nature that was blue, and cloudy, etc., etc. Basically, you wanna use the more sensory experience terms to describe what you’re dreaming about instead of using the mental shortcuts that you’ve come to appreciate.
You want to stop yourself from saying the names of things, and start focusing on what the thing actually is, because the objects and the messages and the visualization that you have in your dream are not to be taken literally in most cases, it’s what that object means to you in itself, it is what you’re subconscious mind is trying to communicate to you. So, if you dream about your friend named Harry, the dream and what the message is probably has nothing to do with Harry, but instead, what Harry represents to you, and what his presence in your dream means for the overall interpretation.
Do these things to where you sleep in cycles of overall duration that are multiples of one-and-a-half hours, record a two sentence summary of your dream immediately after waking up, and then work into getting into greater detail of what your dream is about. These are all things that will help you dream more, dream better, and be able to understand the meaning behind the dream.
There’s a lot of secrets and awesome sauce that lies there waiting for you. Try it out. Good luck. Have a good one. Peace out.