Dream Work

(L) Dream work is when... and I guess you'll have to read some of Ark's journal entries. What you'll need to do is read some of his journal entries and see how he approached a problem of the self. Then when you see how he wrote it down, how he looked at it, saw it, looked at it from different directions. Once you see how to identify the problems, how to think about them, then what you do is you do the meditation. Then when that's over, or even while you're doing it, you think about the problem. You come at it in the same way as if you were writing about it. Maybe even take memories and you examine them and you think about them. You think about everything you can remember. And then you have it in your mind as you go to sleep. Then, if you wake up during the night with a dream, or in the morning with some insight, you write it down. This is where stuff comes from really deep areas. It may be something that's not so much current life dissociation as it is something even deeper. That might be a question you might want to ask.

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Step 1: Make a conscious decision to remember your dreams.

You’ve got a better chance of remembering your dreams if you really want to remember them. Assuming you do want to, tell yourself that you’re going to remember your dreams and conscientiously follow the steps to make your desire to remember your dreams come true.

Step 2: Put a pad and pen or pencil within easy reach of your bed.

It’s best if it just has plain paper with no designs or other distractions. Use this pad only for recording your dreams. Before you go to sleep, make sure it is open to the next page on which you can write so you don’t have to search for a blank page when you wake up. Always put the pen in the same spot so that you don't have to search for that, either. An alternative to writing your dreams is to keep a tape recorder near your bed or under your pillow so that you can verbally recount what happened in your dream.

Step 3: Place your alarm clock close to your bed.

When you wake up you want to be able to focus on remembering your dreams before you perform any other activities. If you can wake up without an alarm clock, you won’t have to worry about turning it off, but if you do need an alarm, make sure you can turn it off quickly and easily, preferably without even moving in bed. Don’t use a radio alarm clock, as the ads or chatter on the morning show will likely distract you from your task.

- If possible, try using a gentler way of waking up. Wake up on your own, ask someone to wake you gently and without talking to you, or hook up a timer to the lights in your room. Many people find that they are able to better recall dreams if they don’t use an alarm clock.

Step 4: Place a post-it note on the alarm clock, with the words "What did you dream?"

or similar in large letters, so that it's the first thing you see when you open your eyes (and turn the alarm clock off).

Step 5: Get to bed early enough to get adequate sleep on a consistent basis.

If you wake up too tired to think, you’ll find it hard to recall your dreams. Too little sleep will also limit the number of dreams you have. People who sleep less than six hours have a hard time remembering dreams.

Step 6: Think about a major problem or emotional concern right before you fall asleep (nothing that will spark too much of a negative feeling).

Think deeply about the situation without pressing for solutions or coming to conclusions. Just thinking about the problem "opens the door", in a sense, to more vividly remembered dreams, and the dreams may even offer more insights regarding the problem at hand.

Step 7: Concentrate on recalling your dream as soon as you wake up.

Typically you can remember only the last dream you had before waking. Don’t move and don’t do anything. Stay in the same position as the one in which you awoke and try to remember as much about your dream as possible before you think about anything else.

- Focus your gaze on the first object you see as you open your eyes. Look at the object; focus on it. That object will most often take the vague recollection of your dream to a placemark in memory where it is easier to recall details. A doorknob, a light bulb, or a nail in the wall, for example, will quell your urge to begin your day, and will help you to settle into memories of what you had experienced while sleeping.

Step 8: Record your dream in your dream journal.

Jot down as much as possible about your dream, starting with a basic sketch that includes such things as the location of the dream, the basic plot, the characters, the overall emotion of the dream (i.e. were you scared or happy in the dream?), and any prominent images you can recall. If you can remember any dialogue, you may want to write it down first, as words in dreams are easily forgotten. Record everything you can, even if you can only remember one image. As you get the basics down, more of the dream may come to you.

- If you can’t remember anything about your dream, write down the first thing that comes into your mind upon waking. It may be related to the dream in some way, and it might trigger recollections. Also write down how you’re feeling when you wake up. The emotions you experience in a dream typically remain, at least for a brief period, when you awake, so if you wake up anxious or elated, ask yourself why.

Step 9: Increase the number of dreams you can remember by writing in your dream journal every time you wake up throughout the night.

You dream several times while you're sleeping, so if you only record the last dream you had before you get up in the morning, there are more dreams you might not be remembering. It’s always tempting to go right back to sleep when you wake up in the middle of the night, but take the opportunity to remember what you were dreaming before you do—in all likelihood you will not remember it in the morning.

- Since you usually only remember the last dream you had, you can remember more dreams by waking up several times during the night. We go through a complete sleep cycle approximately every 90 minutes, so you may find it productive to set your alarm to wake you at some multiple of 90 minutes (such as 4.5, 6, or 7.5 hours) after you expect to go to sleep. Dreams in the later half of the night are typically longer than those you dream soon after going to sleep, so you probably want to wait until at least the 4.5 hour mark to intentionally wake yourself.
- This is only recommended for people who get adequate sleep and who can fall back asleep easily. Otherwise, skip this step.

Step 10: Keep a notepad or voice recorder with you throughout the day.

Often something you see or hear later in the day will trigger a memory of a dream from the night before. Note these recollections without delay, and think about them to see if you can remember how they fit into the rest of the dream.

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Can anyone post something more about how to go about this dream work?

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Here's the following of the basic steps to "remember" dreams that may be helpful to this work

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_http://www.slate.com/id/2251662/?yahoo=y

Can You Force Yourself To Dream?
How to optimize your naps for learning.
By Brian Palmer

A new study shows that a nap can help you memorize images and solve problems, but only if you dream about them. Participants attempted to navigate through a virtual, 3-D maze. Half of them then took a 90-minute nap. Those who dreamed about the maze were 10 times better at negotiating the task than other nappers or subjects who didn't sleep at all. Let's say you really wanted to beat that maze—could you force yourself to dream about it?

Possibly. People are more likely to dream about the things they worry about the most during their waking hours, so the best way to induce a targeted dream is to truly believe that it's important. That's no help to sleep researchers, who often need their subjects to dream about trifles like a maze or brain teaser. They can try to force the issue by having people write notes about the desired dream subject right before going to sleep. They might also encourage the use of visualization or chanting exercises. (Early studies established that repeating a phrase to yourself works better than having someone whispering in your ear.)

No one knows whether these dream incubation techniques really work, though. In 1974, William Dement of Stanford tested 500 students to see if they could dream up a solution to a word problem. To facilitate the experiment, the test subjects were told to write down the problem and visualize the letters on the page as they went to bed. About 20 percent managed to dream about the problem, with seven actually solving it. A more recent study by Deirdre Barrett at Harvard asked student-subjects to solve a problem with more personal relevance—most of them chose a homework assignment or a relationship issue. Half of the students were able to have and remember a dream related to their problem.

The study released this week showed that some students began dreaming about the maze within a minute of falling asleep. The transition between wakefulness and sleep—it's called a hypnogogic state when you're falling asleep and a hypnopompic state while waking up—is poorly understood. Recent research suggests that drifting off is not a linear process in the brain (PDF) and that you alternate several times between wakefulness and sleep before finally succumbing. Researchers are forced to draw a somewhat arbitrary line between the two, usually requiring that certain brain waves disappear on an electroencephalogram for 30 seconds. Many researchers think you have the most control over your dreams—if that is the proper term for the disjointed hypnagogic images and sequences that flash through your mind—in the first minutes of sleep.

These images can be every bit as compelling as the REM-phase dreams that so interested Freud and Jung. August Kekule had one such vision of a snake biting its tail just before realizing that the structure of benzene was a ring rather than a straight chain. Mendeleev reportedly dreamt an image of the periodic table. (Some historians have questioned both Kekule's and Mendeleev's stories.) Many artists, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, relied on the hypnogogic state for inspiration.

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Hildegarda said:

If I understood correctly from Laura's description of Ark's dream work is that aside from dream recall, the preceding reflexion and meditation on a particular issue of concern is of utmost importance.

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mkrnhr said:

Carrying out a notepad all the day is not the most practical solution and the post-it on the clock is a little weird.
As I try to understand the dream work, it is to think hardly on a certain question or a certain aspect of the world, sleep (after taking some melatonin for help), let the subconscious mind resolve it and respond through a dream, and remember the dream when one awakes. And eventually interpret the dream and share it.
Now how to combine this approach with the EE meditation?

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Problem Solving In A Dream

http://www.increasebrainpower.com/in-a-dream.html

The idea came to me in a dream. I was dreaming I was explaining the "add-subtract-change" problem solving technique, having apparently just invented it in that dream. I had never heard of it before, but previously, while awake, I had been working on my book Problem Solving Power. This new technique turned out to be very useful when I tried it. It's an idea that has undoubtedly been thought of by others, but it was unknown to me until that moment.

I 've had this happen before. Story ideas have come to me in a dream, and solutions to problems. When I was younger, I invented a way to sail my sled on the Lake Michigan ice in my dream. When the wind started up the next morning, I tried it for real and it worked.

Perhaps you've solved problems and have had new ideas in your dreams as well. There's no doubt that it happens, but how do we make it happen more often? Try some of the following.
Ideas In A Dream

- Keep pencil (or pen) and paper by the side of the bed. Note any ideas you have when you first wake up. This process encourages your mind to generate even more ideas. A tape recorder by the bedside is even better. You can use it without a light and quickly go back to sleep.

- Work on the problem a lot. A period of intense mental work on a problem before sleep, "instructs" the subconscious mind that this is important, and it will continue to work on the problem during sleep.

- Write the problem down, and write down what qualities the solution may have, just before going to sleep. dreams often utilize real-life elements from the latter part of the time before sleep.

- Practice on simple problems. Get yourself to imagine a new kind of furniture, or a new poem in a dream.

- Turn off the alarm. Wake up without an alarm, and you are more likely to remember your dreams. If you need an alarm for work, do your problem solving in dreams over the weekend.

- When you first wake up, lay still and review any dreams you can recall. This "sets" them in your mind, so you won't forget them. Later you can think back on them, to see if there is anything useful there.

- Try sleeping on the floor or in another slightly uncomfortable way (try this one when you don't have to work the next day). The repeated waking up and going back to sleep creates the opportunities to remember more dreams. I took notes on nine dreams in one night this way. I also had two good ideas from them.

The best ideas may not come in a dream. Often good ideas and solutions to problems come after you wake up. Reviewing the problem mentally in the morning can encourage this process.

Are these techniques scientifically "proven." Not yet. It's tough to scientifically measure the "value" of an idea, or try to say what counts as an idea, in order to see if the frequency increases when using these little tricks. But people have had productive dreams for thousands of years, and there is nothing harmful in trying to find an answer in a dream.

Why not try it tonight?

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Tigersoap said:

There is something that is puzzling me since I am doing the EE and the POTS regarding my dreams.
I used to think that I could, most often, understand parts of the symbolic meaning of my dreams, or at least link them to certain areas of my life or what I was going through. Maybe I never was able to really decipher them anyway and I just tried to make them fit into my awareness at the time, I don't know.
Now I have many dreams that don't make sense to me at all, weird places, situations and discussions, I don't get it.

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