Why I choose to remember my dreams

Ever received an omen of support when you needed it most?

Imagine you’re lying in a desert, heavily pregnant. Old friends and acquaintances crowd around you. They each speak an announcement, emulating the format of a school assembly. But you can’t hear anything anyone is saying. You feel unsupported in the dryness of the desert, surrounded by people you’re no longer in touch with. Out of nowhere, a burning sensation of needing to give birth trumps all other feeling. A soft God-like voice whispers in your ear, ‘You need to give birth to yourself’. You wake up from a dream-like state, feeling like you have a baby kicking inside you.

This was a dream I had when I graduated high school. I’d moved away from the small town I grew up in to start studying in Sydney. I knew no one at university. I was full of insecurity as to how I would fit in and establish myself in the city. Receiving this dream filled me with sublime joy. It reassured me that good things were coming, and that I’m capable of weaving a fulfilling life. Everything I needed could be harnessed from within.

Being receptive to the wisdom in my dreams has guided me to live in alignment with my heart’s truth. Anyone (regardless of race, gender, age, occupation, etc) can benefit from tuning into their dreams.

Here are the main reasons I choose to remember my dreams:

A dream a day keeps the doctor away

I had trouble accessing dreams when I was in my final year of high school. Going to sleep felt like entering a black void. I threw up nearly every morning, feeling like my head had been burnt by a match. I was constantly stressed, sad, and unsure. At the time, I couldn’t pinpoint the precise reason why I felt so ill at ease. Upon reflection, I realise being disconnected from my dreams made me feel deprived. I felt like I was missing out on a deeper sense of connection to myself and to the world around me. When I completed my final exams, I set intentions to remember my dreams. I wanted to fall back into alignment with my heart centre.

It’s been three years since I graduated high school. Instead of starting my day by comparing myself to who pops up on my social media feed or checking how I scored in an assessment, I write about my dreams in my journal. Increasing my awareness around dreams has helped me feel a lot more energised. My improved wellbeing has inspired me to learn more about the relationship between dreams and our health.

This learning trajectory led me to REM. Our most vivid dreams occur while we’re in the REM stage of sleep. Being in the REM stage of sleep is the physical aspect of dreaming. REM is the deepest part of sleep, a highly important process for growth and restoration.

When we’re in the REM stage of sleep:

• our eyes move back and forth underneath closed eyelids

• our brain is highly active (sometimes more so than when we’re awake)

• our breathing is more rapid and variable (as it is when we’re awake).

REM strengthens memory, helps us process information, boosts creativity and stimulates feel-good chemicals like serotonin and dopamine. Meanwhile REM deficiency has been found to hinder immunity, cell reproduction, memory, concentration, and mood. Think about how we feel after an unpleasant day or when we’re feeling ill. Has a good night’s sleep ever let us down? Being in tune with our dreams helps us maintain good health.

Never-ending adventure

I’ve always been excited by dreams. I think it’s amazing that we’re able access other realms while we sleep. As we further our ability to access dreams, we experience more lucid dreams. In lucid dreams, we’re fully aware we’re dreaming. Being more “awake” in our dreams gives us more agency, blurring the boundary between dreams and waking reality.

One night, I had a lucid dream where I was in space. I was in a completely different universe to the one that holds planet earth. In the dream, I jumped between black rose-shaped portals. The energy of each portal urged me to come closer. I was scared. So, I twitched my eyes to escape, only to find myself at another portal. The same God-like voice whispered in my ear, telling me I need to explore the darkness in myself to fully emerge into my creativity.

At the time when I received this dream, I was processing traumas through art therapy. I loved learning more about myself and experimenting with a creative outlet. But a part of me was also afraid of the pain. Lots of amazing people and opportunities were coming into my life. I didn’t want to jeopardise that by reliving the grief of experiences I’d tried to block out. This dream helped me realise that I didn’t need to be afraid of the darkness in me. Pain fuels our creativity, helping us birth through insights that nourish ourselves and those around us.

I’m no gamer. But I’ve always likened dreams to immersing oneself in a video game. Dreams allow us to enter a world that’s different from the one we inhabit when we’re awake. Unlike video games, we don’t need to worry about costs or the negative effects of too much screen time when we dream. Being more connected to our dreams offers unlimited adventure for free!

We learn more about ourselves

Dreams help us learn more about ourselves because they unveil what we try to hide. From my experience, something that regularly appears in our dreams is a sign we need to give our attention to it.

I experienced recurring dreams about high school during my first year of university. The dreams forced me to look at the emotionally climactic situations I’d tried to block out while in school. As I worked through the dreams, I realised they were showing me the holes in my relationship to myself. During high school, I had very low self-confidence. I allowed other people (teachers and students alike) to define my worth. Letting other people push me around made me feel like the dying embers of a campfire after a storm. I needed to shield my own fire.

Being aware of how we feel in the dream and how we feel when we wake up is the first step to getting to know our dreams. From there, we can match how the dream makes us feel to where we experience like emotions in waking reality.

However, the meaning of a dream isn’t set in stone. Dreams are moving bodies of consciousness that evolve with us. We can feel differently about a dream when we flick through our dream journal than we did when we first received it. Dreaming is a highly personal, experiential process.

Connection to higher guidance

Some dreams only appear to be a scrambled iteration of our day. Meanwhile, others hit us with a force from afar. Ever had a dream that predicted the future? Or experienced a déjà vu moment when something happened that you’d seen somewhere before?

I had a dream I was sitting under a large, white tent at a music festival. The pitch-black night allowed me to blur into anonymity. I didn’t feel like interacting with others. So, I hid in the darkness of my insecurities. I then received a text message from a friend. She told me how much she was enjoying a particular performance at the festival. She wanted me to meet her there. I woke up feeling excited.

Three days later, the same friend who appeared in my dream invited me to a musical event. She also spoke to me about not waiting for other people to give us permission to embrace all of who we are. I was enthralled by the synchronicity that surrounded these events! Dreams allow us to connect to other realms so we can access higher guidance. American clairvoyant, Edgar Cayce once said, ‘Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions’.

The value of dreaming is reverberated throughout Indigenous cultures. Be it native American Indians or the Indigenous peoples of Australia, Indigenous cultures have understood that dreams act as a portal in accessing wisdom. Dreams allow us to access wisdom from divine entities, ancestors, plants, animals, the collective unconscious, and our higher selves. In Sigmund Freud’s book ‘The interpretation of dreams’ (1899), he posits the idea that dreams are a window to our unconscious. Our egos can impede our capacity to connect with higher guidance. But dreams trump our ego in ensuring we receive what we need.

Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Jung expanded upon Freud’s ideas through his conceptualisation of the collective unconscious. He drew upon native American wisdom to explain how we share common unconscious experiences and/or emotions from previous generations. Jung believed we enter the world sharing in this unconscious. He also put forward the idea that we interact with the collective unconscious through archetypes that appear in our dreams. Archetypes are characters and/or symbols that embody patterns of universal energy and understanding.

The greatest geniuses in the world (be it artists, scientists, or psychologists, etc) didn’t arrive at their realisations by only looking at what had already been written down. They created ground-breaking work by being open to other ways of receiving information. When I’ve been tongue tied for a university assignment or experienced writers block, I’ve been very fortunate to have received a thread of actualisation in my dreams. My dreams have helped me develop creative ideas. I wake up at all kinds of crazy hours during peak assessment period! Dreams facilitate our connection with higher guidance. This helps us develop our unique gifts.

Tips for improving dream recall

Would you love to remember your dreams but you’re not sure where to start? I’ve worn those exact shoes. We can change the way we move by putting on a different pair of shoes. Our dreams are always there for us. We can choose to access them anytime we like.

Here are my tips for fostering optimal dream recall:

• avoid going to sleep feeling hungry or thirsty

• avoid looking at screens for at least one hour before bed

• focus your awareness on remembering dreams when you wake up each morning

• limit and/or avoid alcohol and caffeinated beverages

• limit and/or avoid highly processed food

• strive to wake up without the need for alarms

• write journal entries about how much you value dreams and the wisdom they bring

• write what you remember from your dreams in your journal every day.

Remembering and embodying the wisdom of our dreams invites a richer reality. Dreams allow us to reconnect with estranged parts of ourselves. They also help us to become more aware of the broader spiritual reality that lives in and around all of us.

How have you been helped by your dreams?