If You’re Not Using Your Dreams For Ideas, You’re Working Too Hard
Did You Dream Last Night?
Even if you can’t remember it, you probably dreamt.
What maelstrom of raw creative material whipped through your mind, untapped?
If you could train pieces of your conscious mind — like little divers into vast, black, unknown waters — you could return from the dream-world with more ideas than you know what to do with.
Don’t Waste Your Unconscious Mind
Your unconscious mind is the underwater portion of the iceberg. Much larger than the little homunculus that is your waking consciousness.
In fact, the unconscious mind is very much in control of what is going on, even at this moment.
Here’s a little game: what is your favorite song?
Did the names of songs boil up from somewhere in your mind? How did that happen? Did you make that happen?
No, the conscious mind only gets the illusion of control, and that breaks down if you look too closely.
So, does that mean there is left nothing to do here?
No. Even though the unconscious mind is always there, feeding us from below, there are many places and times in which we have forgotten how to listen.
If I asked you to quickly write down a story to publish online, you might overthink it. Get twisted up in the conscious mind, and lose the ability to hear what the unconscious is saying.
That’s where dreams come in. Dreams are mainline access to the unconscious. Learning to listen to them is learning to be more in touch with the universe.
But what if you never remember your dreams?
How To Remember Dreams
- Set an intention before bed
- Be still when waking
- Write it down
- Interpret
When going to bed, make an intention that you will have dreams. Make it like a prayer, or a message in a bottle that you send down into the unconscious mind. Trust me, this works.
When you first wake up, be still. Stay in the mood of the dream. Recount everything you can.
Keep pen and paper by the bed and make sure to write it all down, even if you feel like you “got it.” It’s crazy how you can feel like you won’t forget and then you do once you fully wake up.
Interpret the dreams. Go online, ask a therapist, read Jungian dream analysis. It doesn’t have to be accurate, it just helps to begin to attach meaning to them.
Get in the habit of all of this, and you will begin remembering more and more dreams over time. You are training your brain to know that you want to recall the dreams. Give it time, and don’t worry too much about getting ideas yet.
Treat Dreams Like A Child Trying To Tell You Something
Once dreams become a regular part of life, now you can begin mining them for ideas.
A lot of people think that dreams are meaningless and disregard them.
Imagine your dream is like a child. What happens if you just assume that they are babbling nonsense and ignore them? They get frustrated, and even less articulate. It’s really important to be gentle in our interpretations to not frighten away the contact or turn it hostile.
Children will often tell you amazing things if you are willing to listen. However, sometimes they say, “brown dogs are brown!”
Just go, “Uh-huh!” and nod politely. They’ll get ’em next time.
Embrace the Daydream
The term “daydream” has more to do with actual dreaming than we normally might think.
In calmer states of waking consciousness, we are more open and creative. We think more symbolically, wholistically, and laterally, like when dreaming.
In our hyper-productive world, anxiety usually prevents us from properly spacing out from time to time.
That’s ok! That’s why we meditate.
To draw an analogy, yoga is a practice of working hard to get reconnected with what was once effortless, e.g. mind-body connection. Meditation is the same sort of thing. We make a practice of doing what we did all the time as kids. That’s ok!
You might think that meditation is trying to not think. Not true! If you meditate for a very long time, you may get to a peaceful, no-thinking place, but that is not our goal. Our goal is to give our minds space to space-out. Every time we realize we spaced out, we just gently come back to the breath. Not as punishment, but just as a place to go once we realize we have gone somewhere else. The thinking is not a bug. It’s a feature.
Embrace the daydream!
Embrace Middle-Level Consciousness
Coffee in the morning, alcohol at night.
Adderall in the morning, Ambien at night.
Hyper consciousness, total unconsciousness.
No creativity, no dreams.
Creativity comes from relaxed consciousness, right below anxiety. Dreams come from light sleep, right below waking consciousness.
One way to look at the levels of consciousness:
Most people jump from 1 to 4 and back again, with the help of drugs, every day. Ever wonder why you don’t dream when you smoke weed, drink, or take sleeping pills? You never pay a visit to the places in between.
In order to become more complete, creative people, we have to learn to live more in the 2 and 3’s of life.
Judgment is New Idea Death Trap
Judgment is the product of the hyper-switched-on mind. It is the editing floor of consciousness. This, not that. Love that, hate this.
Useful! But not the best place from which to create new things.
If you love to edit but hate to make something new, you might be stuck in level 1 and need to pay level 2 and 3 more visits.
Learn to Hallucinate While Sober
When you start having more dreams and spending more of the day daydreaming, you train yourself to create a little diver guy that can go deeper and deeper into the weird parts of the mind.
That’s the little guy that remembers dreams. He’s a little piece of the conscious mind that you equip with little mind-scuba-gear to go deep.
Another ability that this grants you is the strange ability to hallucinate while awake and sober.
I’ve been meditating for years, and when I have a particularly deep one, I can see that the “normal” world as we perceive it, is itself just a hallucination. We hallucinate reality. When in a deep state, your mind lets go of the rigid hallucination, and things get… weirder, and looser.
A fun and interesting experience in itself, I also perceive that it grants me a greater level of freedom of thought and creativity.
Final Thoughts
Consciousness has so much more to offer us than it seems.
With practice, we can learn to “wake up” into the deeper parts of our minds, remember and use our dreams and daydreams, and become more fulfilled and creative.
Happy diving!
Originally published at https://www.taylorforeman.com on August 8, 2020.
