So last night, I slept so hard as to have a dream with several parts, chapters, etc. It got me thinking — does creativity training affect or otherwise control not only the content of dreams, but also their structure? Obviously dreams have been used and harnessed for creative purposes before, like when Stephen King got the idea for The Shining in one. I’ve even had solutions for work come to me in them.
In addition to a free-write like this, a known effective technique I’m considering resuming is tracking of dreams within a dream journal. Of course, dreams are going to be reflective of your psychology and accounting for them is, in my opinion, an essential aspect of mindfulness.
I mean, think of how long you spend of your life sleeping + dreaming. If you are trying to practice mindfulness, ignoring what is happening while you sleep/dream is ignoring a substantial amount of data.
And perhaps this is precisely the kind of self-awareness required for lucid dreaming. The awareness of the fact that you are asleep and dreaming is in itself a mastery of mindfulness that few are able to (let alone thinking it’s possible to) achieve.
Now, the difficult thing here is a far older topic of discussion. Interpretation of the meaning of dreams has been discussed by Freud but I’m less interested in that kind of analysis. But rather I’m interested in a similar process I do when I’m awake: “What about me and how I’ve been feeling lately is causing me to think this way? Where are those coming from, and if they’re bad, what can I do to stop negative thoughts at the source?
