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YOU'VE GOT TO WANT IT. First and foremost, you must feel that it will be useful to you, if not extremely valuable. Without this, motivation will soon disappear. More importantly, the desire acts as a magnet which draws your dreams into memory. . IT'S A MATTER OF FOCUS AND ATTENTION. Understand that dream recall is an inherent, natural human trait. That is why young children are usually in touch with dreams, as are some native cultures who share their dreams with each other daily. Dream recall is a bit like a mental muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. Without exercise it may shrink, but it is there if you decide to work it out again. So if your recall is poor, trust that it will come in time, and the trust alone will actually help. . BEDTIME PRACTICE: Before sleep, reread your dreams from the previous (or more) night(s). This allows you to begin to connect with your dream memory, and is also an opportunity to interpret your dreams and spot connections to the day's events. Then, as you go to bed, clearly ask (rather than command) yourself to remember your dreams when you awaken in the morning or during the night, and remind yourself that it's a simple, natural process. Also, suggest to yourself that you will spontaneously awaken when you need to without using an alarm clock, since it can inhibit recall. This method works well with practice, but you may initially wish to set your alarm for 15 minutes after your suggested wake-up time, just to be safe. Any time you awaken, keep your eyes closed (or shut them if already open) and remain as motionless as possible. If you moved since waking, return to your earlier body position. Gather as many images, feelings or impressions as you can, then rise and immediately record them in a journal (which you keep bedside) or say them into a tape recorder, no matter how brief or vague they may at first seem. You'll be surprised at how much more you can remember as you write (or speak). If your next day's schedule allows for the possibility of slightly less alertness and you're game to try something a bit more adventurous, try drinking one or more glasses of water before bed so that your body will automatically awaken you during the night - quite likely just after a dream cycle is just complete. This requires a little more dedication but has it's pay-offs since it gives your waking and dreaming states of mind more opportunity to overlap, and hence triggers better dream recall. . BE PLAYFUL, PATIENT, and PERSISTENT. Although most people start having success the first week or two, dream recall is a mental muscle which may require some time to get back into shape. Try to maintain a relaxed and playful attitude of looking forward to your dreams while being willing to let them come all in good time. Trying too hard or being too serious can be limiting factors. Dream recall and motivation tend to come and go naturally in cycles, and also depend upon what else is going on in your life. Once you start on a cycle of focusing on recall, stick with it for at least a few days, because consecutive nights can have an additive effect hough science has proven that we all dream every night, many people often . remember no dreams at all, and even when they do, it is almost exclusively upon awakening, after the fact. Lucid dreams are uniquely different. One realizes that one is dreaming while the dream is still happening. The scene often suddenly expands in richness and color as the dreamer becomes aware that the world being experienced, although appearing utterly real and believable, is only a dream and that she or he is actually safe asleep in bed. With this new understanding, the lucid dreamer is free to explore remarkable worlds limited only by imagination, and now not just as an actor, but also to some degree as a producer and director. Lucid dreaming was brought into the academic and public spotlights around the world once it's scientific validity was separately proven by researchers at Stanford University, California (where it has also been proven to be a learnable skill), and at Liverpool University, England. Proof was achieved by performing, during REM sleep, a series of extreme left-right eye signals which were agreed upon prior to sleep. Though most of the body's muscles are de-activated during REM sleep, the eye muscles are not, and repeated experiments at Stanford, the Sacré-Coeur Hospital Dream and Nightmare Laboratory and elsewhere have proven that the eyes (and to some extent other physiological responses) can be brought under conscious control by a dreamer who realizes that she or he is dreaming. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky of the University of Chicago noticed that the eyes of sleeping babies moved beneath their eyelids at certain regular intervals. This led to the discovery of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep periods, which occur at roughly 60-90 minute intervals throughout the night and which contain the dreams which are the most vivid and most often remembered. Since then, EEG (electroencephalogram) recordings, which monitor brain activity during sleep, have been used to map the various stages of sleep. These states are classified roughly into sleep onset (hypnagogia or stage 1), non-REM sleep (deep sleep or stages 2,3, and 4), and REM (or paradoxical) sleep. . Every person on earth dreams every night – every mammal in fact. It follows then that something extremely important must be going on while we sleep and dream, yet in the industrialized world, the majority of people pay little attention to dreams, and sometimes shortchange themselves on sleep because it is perceived as lost time, or at best unproductive. How astonishing that we generally ignore this third (and possibly far more) of ourselves. An appropriate analogy to the grandeur of this mass misunderstanding is the incredible inertia in the middle ages against the idea of earth being other than flat until repeated point-blank evidence like Galileo’s observation of other planets and their moons and the journeys of Columbus' and other explorers across the ocean proved conclusively otherwise. The challenge was that people’s everyday experience contradicted the idea of a spherical earth because nobody had yet gained perspective from outside of the system. Airplanes and especially photographs from space were not yet available, so there was little first hand evidence of a new paradigm that was quite a great leap beyond the old. Fortunately, people eventually began to come around and the shift triggered an ensuing surge of exploration as the realization and acceptance finally dawned that our world really isn't flat after all. Dreams, in the same way, encompass yet another entire dimension of experience, a world as yet unexplored by most, where a fascinating sphere of activity awaits investigation and possible harvest for greater fulfillment in waking life. The challenge is again the same — common daily experience for the average person offers little proof of this other reality, let alone the possible value of this other dimension of experience, unless one can gain perspective from outside the 9 to 5 work day framework and scientific purely objective system. Dream related mental skills such as dream recall or dream interpretation and information on subjects such as the meaning of nightmares or precognitive dreams isn’t taught in our schools, and the majority of our parents knew or passed on little about the value of dreams as we grew up. So it's no big surprise that many adults remember few or no dreams, and even more rarely contemplate or set out to interpret the guidance and mine the jewels of creative inspiration hidden just below the surface of consciousness in dreams. Basically, nobody told us or showed us how dreams can be extremely practical. The result of where this long-time trend of disregarding dreams has brought society is that the current misguided concepts about the value of dreams are not only crucial misunderstandings, but also represent and even bring about a lack of connection with the subconscious and our own deeper nature. This artificial rift may indirectly, or even rather directly be the source for many of our current personal, cultural and planetary social, political, and environmental challenges.
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