Our dreams have become so frequent lately, we’ve been trying to figure out ways to “catch” and remember them. We keep a little notebook and pen on the night table, trying to train ourselves to write down the details, or even just the essential bits, before waking makes them fade. It’s a kind of discipline, a half-awake awareness that we are cultivating, to remember to jot down the gist to see what the message might be. (Sally once woke from a dream KNOWING that she should cook professionally, although the thought had never crossed her mind before; so that’s what she did).

We find that the notebook is gradually filling; we hope save it in our archive, as we do our I Ching throws (more on that in another post) and diary entrees, to look back on ‘the inside’ of what was going on at the time.

Lately, we’ve been seeing some interesting versions of Dream Books. Our favorite, by Maria Fischer, captures the language of dreams, and the threads of ideas and connections that our dream language makes. It made us wonder why we think that writing is the only way to capture our dreams; why not draw them? Or plot them graphically somehow, as we’ve tried doing with our day…

This abstract collage by artist Elliott Puckett seems dreamlike to us, making non-linear connections. Perhaps collage is a way to give the feeling of a dream, without drawing.

Elliot Puckett

We’ve discovered that even though we don’t always write our dreams down, keeping a little book and pen by the bed has caused us to be more aware of them. We find now that we are often able to wake, and then return to the dream, picking up where we left off…

via Stuart Mason Dambrot

Related posts: notebooks for graphing the past and the future

more on inspiration and other visual journals + scrapbooks

drawing on the wall (cave of forgotten dreams)

building -> growing -> alive (in memory of eleanor mailloux)

dream balloons

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3 replies on “keeping a dream book

  1. You’re tapping into something pretty powerful here. Writing is the easiest way for me to capture dreams, usually, but drawing works too, for some dreams. I’ve been surprised to find that many of my dreams can be drawn as mandalas – – either some visual image from the dream, or a map of how I move through space in the dream, drawn out, or a diagram of the setting of the dream, forms a mandala of some sort. Reading Jung bumped me in this direction.

  2. And if you want to try something wild, do a Google search with the terms “vitamin B6 dreams.” I’ve used B6 two times with very dramatic results. Not sure if it’s placebo effect or not. I’m quite suggestible so that might be the case.

  3. You are the first person I’ve met whose tried to draw/map their dreams. It’s so interesting that they easily take the form of a mandala. Then it becomes a different sort of message, or another layer of one…

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