Keeping your dreams

The teaching

As the craft of the dream diary, from J. W. Dunne to Deirdre Barrett teaches it.

Why dreams vanish

Everyone dreams every night, several times, and most of it is gone by breakfast. The memory of a dream is fragile: it lasts a few minutes after waking unless it is rehearsed, and anything that pulls the mind toward the day, getting up, checking a phone, thinking about the morning, wipes it away. Recall is therefore less a gift than a habit of the first minute after waking, and it grows quickly once it is practised.

The evening before

Put a notebook and pen by the bed, open at a fresh page with tomorrow's date already written. Paper is better than a phone, which draws the mind straight into the day. As you settle, decide to remember your dreams, plainly, as you might decide to wake at a certain hour. Go to bed in time for a full night: the longest dreams wait for its final hours.

The first minute

On waking, keep still and keep the eyes closed. Ask what was just happening. If a fragment comes, do not reach for the whole dream at once. J. W. Dunne, a great keeper of dream records, gave the method plainly: fix the attention on that one small incident and try to remember its details, and a whole section of the dream comes back, often bringing with it an isolated incident from an earlier dream. Gather as many such incidents as you can before writing any of them out.

If you are sure you dreamed nothing, Dunne advised recalling instead what you were thinking when you first woke. That thought usually came out of a dream, and following it leads back in.

Writing it down

Write before doing anything else. Begin with a word or two for each fragment, so that none is lost while you write another, then go back and tell each one more fully. Note the setting, the people, what happened, what was said, and above all the feelings. Note especially anything odd. Dunne advised writing what was seen apart from what it seemed to mean: a shower of sparks, say, before the explanation the dream gave it. Then give the dream a title.

If nothing came, write that, with the date. A blank morning recorded is part of the practice, since the habit of opening the notebook every morning is what trains recall. Drawings are welcome: a map of a dream house or the shape of a strange object often says more than a sentence.

Habits that help

A regular waking time helps the memory of dreams, and so does waking naturally rather than to an alarm. A full night gives more and longer dreams to remember. Alcohol late in the evening and some medicines reduce dreaming or its recall, and a prescribed medicine is never stopped for the sake of dreams. Weekends and holidays, with their slower mornings, are often when recall first takes hold.

Asking a dream for help

Dream incubation is going to sleep with a question in mind in the hope of a dream that speaks to it. It was once a rite of the temples of Asklepios; Deirdre Barrett gives it in a plain modern form. Write the problem down as a brief phrase or sentence and put it by the bed. Review it for a few minutes just before going to bed. Once in bed, picture it as a concrete image if it lends itself to one. Tell yourself, just as you drift off, that you want to dream about it. Keep pen and paper, and perhaps a small light, on the bedside table.

On waking, lie quietly before getting up. Notice whether there is any trace of a dream, invite more of it to return if you can, and write it down. Barrett adds two aids: at bedtime, picture yourself dreaming about the problem, waking and writing; and set objects connected with the problem where you will see them from the bed. An answer, if one comes, may come sideways, as a picture to be read against the question.

Reading the diary back

Once a week, read the entries back from the beginning. Patterns appear that no single morning shows: the same places, the same people, the same feelings, a theme that rises in hard weeks and falls away in easier ones. A dream diary read over months becomes a quiet record of one's own inner weather, and it is the ground for every way of reading dreams on the other branches of this art.

Sleep first

No dream is worth a broken night. The house sets no alarms to catch dreams and asks no one to wake in the night to write. Recall grows on full nights and gentle mornings, and on the mornings when nothing comes, the night has still done its work.