The Dreamers’ Den Series Ep 7: How to Sleep Well and Remember Your Dreams

Know that feeling of a dream having just slipped away? Where you’re sure you were dreaming, but now, nothing is left except a sense that you were somewhere else a moment ago?

If you’re wishing to better remember your dreams, this one’s for you.

It’s not only about remember dreams, though. I’ll start with some tips for making space to remember dreams, and then I’ll dive into something I don’t hear talked about very often: how our physical bodies can impact our dream recall.

Listen in to hear my favorite practices for better remembering your dreams, which all have to do with making space to honor your own dreamtime and invite a deeper awareness of dreaming. Then I’ll give you a glimpse into the thinking of Traditional Chinese Medicine. You’ll hear how your constitution might impact how you dream and how naturally you remember your dreams; how physical health imbalances might contribute to having a hard time remembering dreams; and how you can get your best sleep – so you have the opportunity to dream at all.

If you’ve been trying only psychological techniques to dream more or remember your dreams more, this might offer a helpful new angle.

One important takeaway I want to highlight is that whatever kind of dreaming you’re having right now – whether that’s full of visual and verbal detail or more of an emotional sense without any imagery to go along with it, or something else all together – that’s your dreaming. You can explore any dream, of any length and any quality, to great richness.

A large portion of this episode is devoted to sleep. Getting deep, quality sleep is essential for dreaming. If we always get up too early, or never fall into a deep sleep, this directly detracts from our opportunity to dream. One of the reasons people have been reporting more dreaming during these months of quarantine may be that they’re able to sleep longer hours.

Sleep is important to me as a time for dreaming, and, as a healthcare provider, it’s important because of how it impacts my patients’ physical health. I also have to wonder about the connection between the two: are our dreams essential for our physical health?

As far as I know, no one has researched this, but I’m holding open the question: is one reason poor sleep is associated with poorer health, the lack of dreaming? Do we need to dream in order to heal? Even if we don’t remember our dreams, I think they might be essential to our bodies’ healing, repair, and growth.

You’ll hear me mention the National Sleep Foundation, where you can read more about the connections between sleep, health, and disease: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/ Here’s the post specifically about “sleep hygiene”: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/sleep-hygiene

In this episode, I go over some of the centuries-old wisdom of Traditional Chinese Medicine around what it takes to fall asleep easily, stay asleep, and wake rested. You can read over what I cover, plus see the sleep-supportive tips I mention in the episode, in this post: https://healgrowthriveflow.com/whats-your-insomnia-type/

And, I promised you one more link, the research study about not eating too close to bedtime: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/106/5/1213/4822338

Let me know what you think about this episode, or any questions it brings up for you. Comment here, or come join my free Facebook group, where you’re always welcome to share a dream or chime in on someone else’s.

See you again for the next episode, on the Full Moon.

*this post originally appeared on thedreamersden.org