Dream Journal Exercise

           

I’ve always been pretty good at recalling my own dreams. I still remember many dreams, good and bad, from my childhood. While doing this exercise of recording what I dreamt after waking up I realized that I tend to dream a lot about real life situations that are relevant to my everyday life. Most of the time everything in the dream is normal, except for one detail that is specific for each dream. I remember in old dreams how I would see lost objects from my childhood like the GameBoy that hurricane George took when I was a little kid. Granted, it was my sister’s GameBoy, but it still made me cry.

            I remembered that the other day I dreamt that my grandfather was still alive and just casually hanging out with us at my house. Even though it was sad to realize it was just a dream when I woke up, I still felt happy because it felt so real that it became like another memory I will always have of him. I guess, in one way or another, most of my dreams are wish fulfillment dreams, except those where I end up half naked in a public place for no apparent reason. Those dreams are the worst next to the ones where I’m just falling without any plot. It’s as if my dreams are directed by Michael Bay and where written by a 3 year old who loves throwing things without any provocation.

            The more I try to interpret the meaning of these dreams, the more confused I feel. What am I supposed to learn from this seemingly disconnected hodgepodge of dreams? I’ve noticed that I rarely have these falling dreams anymore. Most of the time I’m dreaming about some situation that is happening in my life at the moment, be it something stressful or something good that I want to relive. I guess I need to continue doing this dream journal exercise and maybe I’ll learn a thing or two about my inner subconscious.