The Importance of Remembering Your Dreams

Dream interpretation and analysis can be anything from a fun and interesting diversion to a serious, full time pursuit.  Many people have been able to analyze their dreams and use the clues found there to address important issues in their waking lives, and dream analysis has been an important subject throughout the ages, from the earliest Greek and Roman philosophers to modern day society.

Before any dreamer can set about analyzing and interpreting his or her dreams, however, those dreams must first be remembered and recorded.  Remembering your dreams is an often overlooked part of dream analysis, but it is the basis upon which all dream analysis stands or falls.

It is important to record dreams quickly, since dreams are one of the hardest things to capture.  Half of a dream's content can be lost in as little as five minutes, and up to 90% of the dream can slip away within less than ten minutes.

Therefore, it is vital that anyone seeking to interpret or analyze his or her dreams keep a dream journal as close to the bed as possible.  Keeping a notepad on the night stand or under the clock radio is ideal.

It is important to get into the habit of playing your dream back in your mind before you even open your eyes.  That is because the clock is ticking as soon as you wake up.  Running the dream back through your mind will serve to strengthen and reinforce some of those little details that will soon be forgotten.

Write down as many of those details as you possibly can, even if it just means jotting down a quick word of phrase.  You can always fill in the gaps later, the goal is to get as much recorded about your dream in as short a period of time as possible.

After you have written down as many details as possible of your dream, it is a good idea to read what you have written, fill in as many gaps and details as you can, and try to make sense of it.  If there are meaningful symbols in your dream, or things you recognize from real life, you may want to circle them or otherwise point them out.

It is best to keep a dream journal over a period of a few nights, in order to look for patterns and similar elements.  There are often recurring themes in dreams, and those recurring themes can provide valuable clues to the root causes of the dream elements.

When interesting and analyzing your dreams, it is best to keep it a fun and exciting exercise.  While dream interpretation can be used by experts such as psychologists and therapists to treat and diagnose issues, that part of dream analysis is best left to the experts.

It is of course possible to use your dreams as healing tools, or as ways to examine underlying issues in your life.  For instance, dreams about being naked are often metaphors for being exposed in a lie, or having a secret revealed.  If you see such a pattern in your dreams, it may be worth examining what parts of yourself you have kept hidden, and for what reasons.

Likewise, dreams of falling are often indications of feeling out of control.  If you see a pattern of falling dreams emerging, you may want to examine your life and try to take better control of your waking hours.