who lose the Dreaming are lost.
— AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL SAYING
Too many of us have lost touch with our dreams. It’s no exaggeration to state that our society is suffering a severe and protracted dream drought.
From the viewpoint of many spiritual traditions, this is a very serious condition. It’s through dreams, say the Navajo, that humans keep in touch with the spirit realm. If you have lost your dreams, say the Iroquois, you’ve lost part of your soul. “It is an age-old fact,” declared the great psychologist C. G. Jung in his last major essay, “that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”1
There are three main reasons for the dream drought in many modern lives:
1. Bad habits. The rhythms and routines of a typical urban life simply don’t support dream recall. Too often we are jolted awake by alarm clocks — or bedmates, or kids who need to get to school — and stumble out into the world, fueled with caffeine, to try to get through our rounds of deadlines and obligations. In many situations, we have nothing that supports and rewards the habit of taking time to collect our dreams. Most of us also lack a practice for creating a safe space where we can share our dreams, receive helpful feedback, and be supported in devising creative action to embody the guidance and energy of our dreams. If we don’t do something with our dreams, we will not dream well.
2. Fear and regret. We run away from our dreams because we think they might be telling us something we don’t want to hear — about the dark side of ourselves, or trouble or illness ahead. We slam the door and say, “It’s only a dream.” This is a poor strategy. Issues we leave unresolved in the night are likely to come round and bite us in the rear end in the everyday world.
Alternatively, we dream of something wonderful — of joy and delight with Mr. or Ms. Right, of a dream home, a dream job, a world of peace and beauty. But when we wake up, we tell ourselves there’s no one like Mr. Right in our life, or we don’t have the looks or the money or the ability to manifest what we enjoyed in our dreams. So again we kiss off the dreams, telling ourselves they are “only” dreams. Again, this is a foolish reflex. If we can dream it, we may just be able to do it.
3. Artificial sleep cycles. Very often our concept of a good night’s sleep is at odds with our dreams. Many of us believe — supported by any number of sleep doctors and pharmaceutical companies — that we need to spend seven or eight hours each night in uninterrupted sleep. This idea would have amazed our ancestors. Before the advent of artificial lighting (gas and then electricity), most humans experienced “segmented sleep,” divided into at least two distinct cycles, a “first sleep” and a “second sleep,” as they used to be called in England.
Experiments by a team led by Dr. Thomas Wehr for the National Institute of Mental Health suggest that, deprived of artificial lighting, people revert to the ancient sleep plan, with an interval of several hours between the two sleeps. One of the most interesting findings of Wehr’s research is that, during this interval, subjects typically register elevated levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone that helps hens to brood peacefully on their eggs for prolonged periods and assists humans in laying eggs of a different kind, by putting them into a benign, altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation.2 Sleep historian A. Roger Ekirch says flatly, “Consolidated sleep, as we experience it today, is unnatural.”3
Among indigenous and early peoples, the liminal state of dorveille (sleep-wake) is a time when you might stir and share dreams with whoever is available. It’s a highly creative state, so much so that, in my Secret History of Dreaming, I have called it the “solution state,” based on the many scientific discoveries and other breakthroughs that have come to people while in this zone. When we are primed or medicated to give ourselves just one longish sleep period, we limit our chances of recalling and sharing dreams, and we deprive ourselves of easy access to the fertile field of hypnagogia — the images that come and the connections that are made — between sleep and waking.
Five Ways to Break a Dream Drought
Have you lost touch with your dreams? Is your dream recall limited to fragments that fade away as you hurry off into the business and traffic of the day? Relax. Here are some fun and easy ways to renew and refresh your relationship with your dreams.
1. Set an intention for the night. Before sleep, write down an intention for the hours of dream and twilight that lie ahead. This can be a travel plan (“I would like to go to Hawaii” or “I would like to visit my girlfriend/boyfriend”). It might be a specific request for guidance (“I want to know what will happen if I change my job”). It could be a more general setting of direction (“I ask for healing” or “I open myself to my creative source”). You might simply say, “I want to have fun in my dreams and remember.”
Make sure your intention has some juice. Don’t make dream recall one more chore to fit in with all the others.
If you like, you can make a little ritual of dream incubation, a simple version of what ancient seekers did when they traveled to temples of dream healing, like those of Asklepios, in hopes of a night encounter with a sacred guide. You can take a special bath or shower, play a recording of the sounds of nature or running water, and meditate for a while on an object or picture that relates to your intention. You might want to avoid eating heavily or drinking alcohol within a couple of hours of sleep. You could get yourself a little mugwort pillow — in folk tradition, mugwort is an excellent dream bringer — and place it under or near your regular pillow.
2. Be ready to receive. Having set your intention, make sure you have the means to honor it. Keep pen and paper (or a voice recorder) next to your bed so you are ready to record when you wake up. Record something whenever you wake up, even if it’s at 3 AM. If you have to go to the bathroom, take your notebook with you and practice doing two things at once. Sometimes the dreams we most need to hear come visiting at rather antisocial hours, from the viewpoint of the little, everyday mind.
3. Be kind to fragments. Don’t give up on fragments from your night dreams. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you may find you pull back more of the previously forgotten dream. The odd word or phrase left over from a dream may be an intriguing clue, if you are willing to do a little detective work.
Suppose you wake with nothing more than the sense of a certain color. It could be interesting to notice that today is a Red Day, or a Green Day, to dress accordingly, to allow the energy of that color to travel with you, and to meditate on the qualities of red or green and see what life memories that evokes.
4. Still no dream recall? No worries. If you don’t remember a dream when you first wake up, laze in bed for a few minutes and see if something comes back. Wiggle around in the bed. Sometimes returning to the body posture we were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what we were dreaming when we were in that position.
If you still don’t have a dream, write something down anyway: whatever is in your awareness, including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams: “I’m listening. Talk to me.”
You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have a sense of clarity and direction that is a legacy of the night. We solve problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process that went on in our dreaming minds.
5. Remember, you don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream symbols if we
