Hold on tight to your dream

It's been nearly a year since I embarked on keeping a dream diary. A most excellent enterprise, one that I thoroughly recommend to who regularly dream vivid dreams. We spend a third of our lives asleep, a rich seam of creative thought untapped; our dreams serving as a portal to another Universe. Capturing the essence of what you dreamt in words is a valuable exercise in developing writing skills. Dreams are so unique and other-worldly experiences that summing up what you undergo each night by writing them down enhances your creative writing skills.

Yet it's not a straightforward task. I often find myself in a situation in which I wake up in the middle of the night, having just experienced an interesting dream. However, it's quarter past three in the morning and I just can't be bothered to get out of bed, switch on the light, write down what I dreamt, and switch the light off before getting back into bed. Yet it's a interesting, valuable, meaningful dream. I don't want to lose the texture of its fabric - so I drift off back to sleep thinking about it, trying to remember its most salient points from which I can re-remember as much detail as possible when I awake in the morning...

But the result of my 'holding on tight to my dream' is that it gets in the way of new dreams.

As they start to form, they are pushed aside as my subconscious consciousness continues to attempt to maintain the structure of the old dream - the location, the narrative, the characters, the dialogue, its unique atmosphere. Meanwhile, nascent threads that would otherwise hold promise in the form of new dreams are stifled.

What to do? I feel that a bedside table with lamp would be answer. Getting out of bed to switch on and then again to switch off the bedroom light doesn't help. As Ayad Akhtar's English lecturer posited, moving your spine from the position in which you were dreaming erases memories of that dream. So capture it with a string of several key words, then return quickly to sleep with an empty mind. And on waking up finally in the morning, use those words to trigger a flow of memory. Still, with three or four distinct dreams over the space of a night, this is still difficult. 

Hold on tight to your dream

After three weeks sleeping with my head pointing south and my feet pointing north, I could see that the vividness of my dreams was fading, so I turned myself around to my usual position - head pointing north, feet to the south. And goodness! The change has supercharged my dreams, with five separate dreams noted last (thought the last one was clouded by my brain subconsciously still dwelling on the fourth one). I guess the key thing is change; not to stay in one alignment for too long!

This time last year:

A symbolic collapse

This time seven years ago:

Surprised by a lack of snow for Christmas!

This time eight years ago:
Man falls under train at W-wa Żwirki i Wigury

This time 11 years ago:
Kidnapped by Koleje Mazowieckie

This time 12 years ago:
Google Earth updates Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Out and about with two foot of glass