Travel brings a vivid dream life. Keeping a dream journal can help you remember your dreams once you get home.
Photo: Meanest Indian
As a rule, my nights are dreamless. Oh, I know they say you dream every night. I guess I have to take that on faith.
As a boy my dreams were glorious Technicolor affairs, weaving fantasy, absurdity, terror, and profundity into narratives the might give Lewis Carroll a run for his money. Somewhere, all that stopped, until I set foot in Italy in 2002, my first journey overseas.
Then came the dreams. It was like the dreams were all stuck in traffic and arrived at once.
When you travel without rush or any real consequence of time, your mind shifts to a watching, patient thing.
One tested method for more dreaming is keeping a dream journal. Starting a dream journal is easy and makes an awesome addition to your regular travel journal. Here’s how:
1. Get a notebook or journal specifically to record your dreams in and keep it within arm’s reach of your bed. Dreams fade fast and it is important to record as much as possible as soon as possible.
Photo: akshay moon
2. Write in the present tense and write down every possible detail of your dream. Location, sounds, objects, colors, characters, and your emotional state are important elements of your dream to explore.
What is the feeling it leaves you with when you wake up?
It is OK to scribble random feelings and scattered, lingering thoughts from your dream. Don’t constrain your journal with grammar or punctuation worries. Sketch the landscapes or scenes from your dreams. The more you actively remember your dreams the easier it will be to slip into dreams and remember them with clarity.
3. Be consistent. You don’t have to do it every day but journal as often as possible. Enriching the memory and experience of your dreams takes practice. Who knows? Soon you could have a best selling dream journal like Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams.
Dream often and dream big!
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6 Comments... join the discussion!
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I used to have the best dreams as a kid every time my family took a trip to Colorado. Chalked it up to the elevation. But for sure, travel in general can do interesting things to the subconscious.
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I can still recount in full detail many of the dreams of my childhood.
My brother and I would wake up and regale each other with our slumber time adventures.
Travel does it to me, I love it. Even a camping trip will get me up and dreaming…↵ -
I don’t dream a lot at home, I guess I have too much on my mind. But when I am traveling, my dreams are very vivid. Maybe it is being away that gets rid of all of the clutter in my mind.
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I find I often dream (or remember my dreams) a lot more when I’m doing personal work. Also, since I’ve been traveling, I’ve been dreaming like crazy.
Thing is, I know that they are all messages from my subconscious (esp. the recurring ones), but I often have a hard time figuring out what exactly they mean. I’ve even tried breaking down a few with a friend who completed a dream studies program, but to no avail (even though he completely follows in life what his sleep dreams are telling him).
Beautiful writing!
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“what they mean” is a concept that i go back and forth on, sometimes I am sure i know what messages are trying to be resolved in my head and sometimes it seems so random and out of control.
Dreaming is true freedom, it is a gift to our psyche; a relief from ourselves and the waking manifest world.
Keep dreaming with an open heart.
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