Dreams

I'm very big on dreams, and have been for a while, the degree of vividness and intensity changes, and sometimes there are lead-offs into consciousness where I continue seeing very vivid images in my mind even when I'm very conscious and awake. The vivid conscious images thing frightened me a lot for a while, until I realised they were fine, and not an indication of incipient mental breakdown, but a normal highly psychologically active, part of my psychological cycle of facing things, and absorbing and accepting them, at different levels of my being, from facing something as a feeling, thought or an insight, to really absorbing the full emotional force of something I have to face in my life. So now I basically just let them flow in me, and impact me in whatever way the experience wants to.

I write my dreams down very often. Not to look for meaning, but to crystallise the emotion of the dream, because it's through grasping and working with the emotion that I get to sit on the cusp of who I am becoming if I can face the feelings effectively. It's not just a matter of trying to accept the emotions, although for a really panic-filled dream the first thing is just breathing, breathing, breathing, and then getting hold of myself, and then pulling myself together enough to write the stuff down in order to really process it properly. I also find my mind free associates while I am writing the dream so I make associations between my waking life and what was going on during the dream, and that helps hugely to make connections between my waking mind and my unconscious mind. 

If I have had a frightening dream or something vaguely disturbing that leaves me in a fog, it can be terrifying to relive it again by writing it down, but I tell myself that nothing can hurt me from writing things down - novelists can write some terrible things but often lead very quiet, calm and uneventful lives. Then once I have written it down, the act of writing has helped me to construct that bridge between my conscious and unconscious life, where I can really think about the insights that have come about through the process of writing it down, and those things can offer a huge insights and big shifts in my values or how I am approaching life. From that point of view, I see the dreams of saving me an awful lot of time, where I can process all of the feelings and insights of a situation without having to go through all that effort of interacting with people to accomplish the same thing. 

About 80-90% of my dreams have a music track playing while I dream them, particularly at the end of the dream, but often all the way through it. It's mostly music I have been listening to on Spotify, but occasionally it's something that my brain has just invented, which feels cool when it happens. I also find the act of writing my dream familiarises and expresses my dreaming voice, which is a very soft, informal, creative part of my being, and expressing that voice helps me to bring more of that soft, informal, loose side of myself into the world, I think. 

I'm very big on dreams, and have been for a while, the degree of vividness and intensity changes, and sometimes there are lead-offs into consciousness where I continue seeing very vivid images in my mind even when I'm very conscious and awake. The vivid conscious images thing frightened me a lot for a while, until I realised they were fine, and not an indication of incipient mental breakdown, but a normal highly psychologically active, part of my psychological cycle of facing things, and absorbing and accepting them, at different levels of my being, from facing something as a feeling, thought or an insight, to really absorbing the full emotional force of something I have to face in my life. So now I basically just let them flow in me, and impact me in whatever way the experience wants to.

I write my dreams down very often. Not to look for meaning, but to crystallise the emotion of the dream, because it's through grasping and working with the emotion that I get to sit on the cusp of who I am becoming if I can face the feelings effectively. It's not just a matter of trying to accept the emotions, although for a really panic-filled dream the first thing is just breathing, breathing, breathing, and then getting hold of myself, and then pulling myself together enough to write the stuff down in order to really process it properly. I also find my mind free associates while I am writing the dream so I make associations between my waking life and what was going on during the dream, and that helps hugely to make connections between my waking mind and my unconscious mind. 

If I have had a frightening dream or something vaguely disturbing that leaves me in a fog, it can be terrifying to relive it again by writing it down, but I tell myself that nothing can hurt me from writing things down - novelists can write some terrible things but often lead very quiet, calm and uneventful lives. Then once I have written it down, the act of writing has helped me to construct that bridge between my conscious and unconscious life, where I can really think about the insights that have come about through the process of writing it down, and those things can offer a huge insights and big shifts in my values or how I am approaching life. From that point of view, I see the dreams of saving me an awful lot of time, where I can process all of the feelings and insights of a situation without having to go through all that effort of interacting with people to accomplish the same thing. 

About 80-90% of my dreams have a music track playing while I dream them, particularly at the end of the dream, but often all the way through it. It's mostly music I have been listening to on Spotify, but occasionally it's something that my brain has just invented, which feels cool when it happens. I also find the act of writing my dream familiarises and expresses my dreaming voice, which is a very soft, informal, creative part of my being, and expressing that voice helps me to bring more of that soft, informal, loose side of myself into the world, I think.