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Advice from the ghetto: re dreams

 
 
The Puck
22:56 / 27.02.04
cosidering the fictionsuit i occupy youd think i have plenty to say bout dreams, well i dont, the only dreams i remember are a couple of nightmares i once had and a cool flying one with a jimi hendrix soundtrack. When mentioning it to someone recently they looked at me with pity, this suprised me so after asking around i found out that loads of people remember there dreams, i also noticed the more magik inclined they where, the more they interacted with them

so my question is this this, is they ability to dream (and/or remember them)connected to the use of magik? does it affect me in any other way? and could there be a more esoteric reason for me non dreaming?

please dont refer me to books or use long words
 
 
Olulabelle
17:02 / 28.02.04
Puck

Firstly, everybody dreams. EVERYBODY. Some people don't remember them but they still dream.

Secondly, you can teach yourself to recall your dreams because dream recall is more a question of practice than anything else. Most people who say they don't remember their dreams probably could if they practiced a little bit and did a few key things.

I don't know how much you know about sleep but there are 2 stages of it, NREM and REM. Dreaming occurs in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. I think REM sleep alternates with NREM around every 90 minutes and if you sleep normally you propably go through this cycle about 5 times a night.

That means that there are lots of points when you could wake up and have just been dreaming, so one thing you can do is set your alarm clock for multiples of 90 minutes throughout the night (the later ones are better than the early ones because the REM period is longer later in the sleep cycles.) When you wake lie still and recall anything you were dreaming of, no matter how fragmented and write it down.

You will find that almost everyone who is interested in dreaming techniques keeps a dreaming journal next to their bed and writes down everything they dream, no matter how irrelevant or 'bitty' it may seem. If you don't recall actual dreams at first, try concentrating on how you feel on waking, any lasting images or emotions.

You can also try visualising yourself dreaming, waking, recalling the dream and writing it down. And before you go to sleep try saying the phrase 'I will remember my dream' over and over again to yourself.

Unless you drink or take drugs really heavily all the time, or smoke heaps of weed, you should find that your recall quickly becomes better and better. You just need to put the effort in and have the desire to do it.

Thirdly, I would say that the reason that lots of magickally inclined people are good at dream recall is because they use dreaming as a magickal tool - lucidity or shared dreaming or whatever. So they've practiced and practiced and made sure that they've got excellent recall in order to work within the dreaming; for example working at shared dreaming with someone is a completely futile exercise if you can't recall what you dreamt when you wake up.

You definitely do dream, in experiments even people who are utterly convinced they don't find that under scientific conditions when they are wakened at the correct period of REM sleep they can recall what they were dreaming. People who think they don't dream probably have a sleep pattern that puts too much time between their last REM sleep period, and waking. So try changing how and when you sleep and see what happens.

And let me know how you get on.
 
  
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