There are many different reasons for keeping a dream
diary. In general, familiarity with our dreams opens within us a more
comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of the human psyche, ours and
any other. Dreams may be little more than sensory 'brain farts', but
those that are more highly organized can be efforts at both revelation and
deception, a way of showing ourselves what we have missed in waking like
and a way of distorting what we censor of waking life. Dreams help
fulfill the admonition to ‘know thyself’, although for the purposes of
Gods of Platonia, we keep a dream diary for our initial awareness of
the workings of so-called precognition in our lives.
If we record events in a dream that fulfill themselves
in undeniable detail later, we have no means of escaping their
implications for the nature of our personal existence. Dreams carry with
them feeling-tones of deep and powerful emotions. Many dreams are
remembered because of feeling-tones that are alien to our waking
experience. Such feeling-tones lie beneath every word in our vocabulary
and are both the language and the building blocks of our conscious
reality. We disown them when we try to handle 'objective physical
reality' discompassionately, but they permeate our dreams to the core and
we all sense the pertinence of our dreams even when we cannot connect
dream events to our waking lives.
Precognitive dreams are different. They are like dry
runs of waking reality. When they occur and are confirmed for what they
are, we sense how they differ from dreams with deeper connections we
cannot identify. We sense there is more to reality than we know in the
light of day.
Instructions for dream diaries are common in
contemporary literature, often based upon research conducted in university
labs across the country. Over the years, these instructions have been
relayed from article to article and refined along the way. Ours follow
suit.
Enter a date in a loose-leaf notebook so that pages can
be added if the need arises. We do a quick synopsis of each dream and
briefly tell where our dream took place and any pertinent happenings in
our waking life that may have had a bearing on it. We could, of course,
use a voice recorder for initial impressions and do our written diary at a
later time. The key is to record a dream as soon as possible. Memory
intention steadily improves with effort.
Before we recount the dream itself, we provide a
setting for the dream, whether it takes place inside or outside, in
daylight or at night. We make these brief notes, packing as much
information into as little space as possible. Everything we record may
jog further memory later. We include as much detail as we can, as much as
we have time for. As time passes, we will remember more of each dream and
putting it all down on paper can become burdensome.
When we recount the dream itself, we write as if it is
taking place in the moment, in first-person/present-tense, as in, “I
walk down this dark alley and a white dog watches me from a window…”
Our dream diary will sound a lot like our character diary because of the
way it is written.
Keep in mind that we may find personally revealing
material in our dream diary similar to what we seek in our character
diary, just as we may encounter precognitive material in our character
diary. The extra pages we can insert into our loose-leaf notebook may
come in handy to note these cross-references when they occur.
We keep a scratch pad, or the voice recorder, rather
than the dream diary itself at our side at night. If we awaken with a
dream fresh in mind, it won’t be fresh hours later, if we remember it at
all. Our scrawl may hardly be legible, but the account can be transferred
to the better organized dream diary when we have more time.
We wait two days for evidence of precognitive
material. If connections between a dream and a waking event are vague,
they can be disregarded. We keep an eye out for the highly specific
details that undeniably connect a dream with a later waking experience,
especially a dream that triggers a synchronous run of intricately related
events. These are the kinds of experiences we want to consciously
acknowledge as precognitive or synchronous. A few may be coincidental no
matter how unlikely, but an accumulation of highly unlikely precognitive
dreams or elements of a dream will be convincing evidence of the reality
of the phenomenon.
As for the risk of self-deception inherent in examining
the contents of one’s own mind, learning to catch one’s self at it, as we
invariably will, is in itself a valuable a tool in the life-long process
of self-examination. Self-deception seldom escapes detection when taken
too far, or used too often. The more risks we take in that regard, the
less likely we succeed for any length of time.
Dreams can become alarmingly intense and vivid if we
make some effort to improve our memory of their presence in our lives.
There is such a beast as a lucid dream, a dream in which waking
consciousness is aroused within the confines of a dream, and at this point
we begin to wonder from whence do these rich tapestries emerge? The
people we dream about are never entirely people we know in waking life,
although we try to put familiar faces on them. The places we dream about
are never entirely the familiar places of our waking memory.
Contrary to some opinion, dreaming is awareness of
landscapes of conscious potential we do not fully understand, and we ask
too few questions about things we do not understand. Examining dreams is
a vital part of our exploration of conscious existence.
