How to Remember Your Dreams, and Why

Part I in a series on dreamwork

Jacob’s Dream. Raphael, 1518.

Sometime in the autumn of 2018 I had a dream:

I received a literary magazine in the mail, and unexpectedly found that I’d had a couple of poems published in it. The magazine editors had screwed up the formatting somehow, but I was nevertheless so proud and excited to finally see my poems in print—especially because I couldn’t remember writing these poems or submitting them to the magazine! I couldn’t wait to show my parents.

Then I woke up. First with a sense of disappointment that it hadn’t really happened. Then with a sense of longing.

Later that week, while eating lunch alone at a restaurant, I used my phone to search for writing classes nearby. That’s how I discovered San Diego Writers, Ink, a local nonprofit writers’ guild, and signed up for a year-long certificate program in poetry. By the end of that year, I had published two poems in the San Diego Poetry Annual, one of which was a finalist for the Steve Kowit Prize, a local poetry honor.

My dream became a reality. But only because I acted on it.

I’ve written before about the important role that dreams have played in my life and career.

Today, I want to write a little bit about why dreams are important to me, and why you should consider remembering yours and writing them down. In a future post, I’ll write more about the approach to dreamwork that I learned from my mentors.

Why Work With Dreams?

Given that primates and other mammals dream, humans have lived with dreams as part of our experience for our entire evolutionary history. In traditional cultures, dreams have been honored from the stone age to the present as important messages, relevant not only to the individual, but sometimes the whole tribe.

Dreams play an important role in some of our earliest recorded stories, such as Jacob’s dream of the “stairway to heaven” in the Book of Genesis. This story is just one example of the religious and spiritual significance that’s historically been attributed to dreams.

Throughout history, dreams have inspired some of the most creative minds in the arts and sciences. Salvador Dali described his artwork as “hand-painted dream photographs.” The 19th century chemist August Kekulé famously discovered the ring structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake eating its own tail.

Dreams lie at the very origin of the field of psychotherapy. Freud called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious,” and Jung made dream interpretation the centerpiece of his method of analytical psychology.

Scientists long dismissed dreams as the meaningless detritus of the brain. But more recent scientific theories on dreams see them as part of the brain’s way of attempting to make sense of and learn from our waking experiences. In particular, studies show that our dreams often relate to our emotions and relationships.

In my personal experience, relating intentionally to my dreams has been a source of inspiration, creativity, and insight. In working with clients, dreams often provide a clue to what’s happening under the under the hood, so to speak. Talking about dreams leads us to insights that we would not have happened upon otherwise.

It’s really only in our modern, Western culture that dreams are given short shrift. Perhaps it’s because we live in a world of manufactured dreams—TV, movies, video games, social media, advertising, and porn—that we ignore the high definition, immersive, virtual reality psychedelic experiences our minds create for us every night.

And so, the most important reason I can give you to work with—or rather, live with—dreams is an intangible one.

Living with dreams adds another dimension to our experience. It’s like when Dorothy arrives in Oz and goes from a black-and-white reality to a Technicolor one. This other dimension, this Oz, is an intrinsic part of our experience as humans, and it’s pretty fucking wild. Why would we choose to stay in Kansas, living in black and white, when we can visit Oz every night?

How to Remember Your Dreams

Many people I talk to say they don’t remember their dreams. But unless you have a rare sleep disorder, you probably dream multiple times every night. (Alcohol, cannabis, and other substances can also disrupt your sleep architecture, and cannabis in particular reduces REM sleep, when we do most of our dreaming).

Most of of us have a hard time remembering our dreams. The secret is to write them down.

I recommend keeping a journal, pen, and reading light on your nightstand. Alternatively, you can use your phone or a voice recording device. The key is to record your dream in some way as soon as you wake up, because, as you have probably already experienced, we tend to forget our dreams within minutes after waking.

Beware of the thought that says “Oh, I’ll remember it. I’ll just go back to sleep and write it down later.” No, you probably won’t.

At first, you might only remember the barest scrap of a dream. But that’s okay. Write anything you can: a single image, a couple of words. The more you write down, the more you will recall in the future. You’re teaching your brain that dreams are important and that you want to remember them.

I’ll be honest: this may feel like a lot of work at first. You need a strong enough desire to remember your dreams to put in the work.

The good news is that it if you stay consistent, it will probably only take you a few days or weeks to start remembering your dreams more consistently, and you’ll recall them with more and more vividness and detail.

At some point, you might start remembering multiple dreams per night, more than you can possibly write down. In that case, focus on recording just the one or two dreams each night that stand out to you the most.

What To Do With Your Dreams

In a future post, I’ll write more about how to work with your dreams once you’ve written them down.

For now, I recommend relating to your dreams the way you might relate to a poem. A poem isn’t something you decode, like a cipher. It’s something you ponder, appreciate, and wonder about.

Read your dream a couple of times. Relive it in your imagination. Think about what it might relate to in your life, and what it might mean for you. (Don’t use “dream dictionaries.” Those are bullshit.)

Let your dreams stay with you as you go about your day. Live with them. Walk with them. If one feels particularly meaningful, share it with a friend, partner, or therapist. You never know when a dream might trigger some new and unexpected insight.

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Thanks for reading Mindful Mondays. As always, I appreciate your feedback. Feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment on Substack to let me know what you think.

Chris Cordry, LMFT

PS: Want to experience what it’s like to work with your dreams in an intentional way that helps you find direction and inspiration in your life? Reply to this email to book a free 20-minute consultation about 1:1 coaching with me.

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