Keeping a Dream Journal
Build up a relationship with your journal as you would with a spiritual friend. It can become a barometer of our growing relationship to ourselves, others, and to God.
A dream journal is completely private not to be read by others, unless we share it. You can keep sections in it for life experience, fantasies, inspirational saying, pictures, creative writing, art work, songs, poems --anything that has relevance to your life journey. A section for personal symbols and for universal symbols is a must. You can keep one section for dream tasks. As you continue work in the journal, themes, issues, and patterns emerge which you may like to record in a separate section.

Procedure

1. To begin a dream journal, use a notebook, loose-leaf binder, or some other way of keeping all your and dreams work material in order and in one place. Identify the journal as your private domain.
2. Put a date on every entry you make in your dream journal.
3. Keep an orderly record of your dreams in the journal. Some journalers write their dreams only on one side of each page, saving the facing page foe dreamwork.
4. Make note of any outer life events or choices that might have had a bearing on your dream.
5. Journal important life events or situations. positive and negative, which evoke energy and strong response in you. Treat them as you would a dream and apply dreamwork.
6. At the end of each review your journal work and summarize the most important events, choices, personality changes, dreams, dreamwork, and dialogues. Share your spiritual growth process with friends and like-minded people.

How to get Meaning of Dreams
Now you are ready to get the meaning of dream. You can use any of the dreamwork techniques follow :

1. Title, Theme, Affect, Question : You give the dream a title and theme, stating the major theme or issue that surfaced in the dream. Then write your dominant feeling experienced thoroughly during the dream, or sequence of feelings, and finally see what question the dream is asking of you, what is the dream trying to make you conscious of?
2. Key Questions: Draw up a series of questions which are functional and relational and then respond to them in writing. Begin with the two that seem most important. Then write a summary and how this applies to your daily life.
3. Senoi Dream Method:

1. Tell the dream to someone, the other person writes down each figure, person or symbol as you the dream, become aware of the source of power in the dream.
2. Now become each part and use free association as long as it flows. Ask it any questions you wish to, see if you have a part like that in your life,and when you are finished say thank you and goodbye.
3. If it is frightening dream, confront and conquer the danger. Do not run from any threatening image. Turn and face it. Conquer it in some way. Kill it (thereby permanently claiming its power as your own) or overfeed it and render it helpless, stare it down, make it your friend, etc.
4. Ask for a helper when danger threatens.
5. Develop dream guides or helpers in solving your daily problems or in future dreams. Dialogue with your guides, meditate on them, express appreciation for their help.
6. Advance toward pleasure in every dream. Obtain a positive outcome.
7. Problem Solving : Dream images are always there to help.
8. Continue with the figure until all are completed.
9. Now ask the focus figure to take you to the source of his power.
10. Ask a gift from the power source that represents their power or love for you. Demand a gift that is useful to you and your community, give it thanks. Share the dream gift with the group.
11. Draw the gift in a beautiful way. Meditate on it, internalise it, and grow in it. What dream tasks are indicated for this dream ?

4. Dream Incubation : Before going to sleep, focus on any problem or question that concerns you. Go over your day and all its experiences. Now examine the problem as thoroughly as you can, write down all aspects of it. Write your feelings also. Now frame an incubation phrase - one line, clearly stating your problem. Write it in bold letters and place a big star in the margin next to it. Then turn off the light and close your eyes. Focus your imagination on the issue ad you feel sleep coming, repeat the incubation phrase several times.
   As soon as you wake up, record your dream - even it doesn’t seem to have any connection to the problem. Then use any dream technique to get the meaning. If you didn’t remember the dream, incubate it again next night.
5. Symbols :

1. Ask the symbol questions.
2. Immerse yourself in the symbol, experiencing being it.
3. Carry the symbol forward, reenter the dream and let it carry forward in time.
4. Carry the symbol back in time, like a motion picture running in reverse.
5. Amplify the symbol : seek the qualities and relations within the symbol.
6. Symbol Association : link with it through memory, knowledge beliefs and attitudes.

Think what the symbol reminds you us of until some awareness clicks in you.

6. Choose Dreamwork Tasks : A task is a committment to doing a specific project within a specific time. The task combines reflection with action. The guide presents a list of tasks, going where the most or least energy is and the dreamer selects one or two that seem meaningful to do.
7. Objectifying the Dream : See what the dream ego is doing and not doing. Note the major contrasts and similarities in the dream. See the major symbols and relationship between them. Note the dream sequence, issues, conflicts, and unresolved situations. See what healing factors are present in the dream.
8. Following the Dream Ego1 : Make columns listing everything the dream ago did in the dream (Column 1). List in column 2, the attitudes and feelings next to each action. See which attitudes are positive and negative and change all negative attitudes into affirmations by rewriting it as a life- affirming, reality-affirming statement. In column 3, list alternatives, changes you will make for the actions and attitudes. Compare your dream ego with your waking ego.
9. Nightmares : Deal with the major issue in the dream and solve it. Reenter the dream and resolve the issue. Carry the dream forward in imagination. Confront the adversary and make it a friend; rewrite the dream.
10. Dialogue with Dream Images : Choose one dream image, personify it sitting in a chair opposite you and begin the dialogue. Switch chairs and play both sides, write the dialogue. Select three or four questions to ask to start the dialogue, let it flow as long as it wishes.
11. Lucid Dreaming and Dream Yoga : When in the midst of the experience of a dream we realize we are dreaming, then the dream is said to be "lucid". We realized consciously in the dream that it is aspects of our own being that we are seeing. The act of repression is withdrawn. Often people use the experience of lucidity to wake themselves up in unpleasant dreams. The cultivation of lucid dreaming has been a religious and meditative discipline since before Patanjali first wrote poems of instruction in yogic meditation around 800B.C. Lucid dreaming has always been an element of religious practice in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and others. For Tibetan Buddhists, the ability to remain lucid in a dream is a matter of the utmost religious importance. This lucidity can be guided by a spiritual director after purification and meditating in silence and solitude. The benefit of lucid dreaming is it gives us the capacity to change our reactions and select other responses. This is a way of altering our ego responses to what is happening. The steps are :

• First, determine your values, reasons, and intentions for producing lucid dreaming.
• Formulate one simple action or signal which, when it occurs in a dream, will let you know that you are dreaming. You might choose a dream symbol such as your hands to focus on while dreaming. Keep a record of your successes and failures.

___________

1. The dream ego is the character or characters in the dream that feel like you.

• When you have been able to signal yourself once in a while that you are dreaming, then introduce the element of choice. As soon as you realize you are dreaming, make a choice in terms of the dream landscape you are in. Start flying, or open a door, or produce something. Afterwards record the whole dream and note what part your conscious intentionality played in it.
• The next phase is choosing what to do with your ability to choose and create while dreaming. you can manipulate the dream state in various ways for the experience in itself.
• Record your process and its importance to you. Evaluate what meaning the experience has in terms of the rest of your life.
• When a lucid dream happens spontaneously or is induced by you, an excellent method to use with it is following the Dream Ego because it may have a lot to do with your own consciousness and choice - making.

Lucid dreaming often helps us solve problems which we balk at, at the conscious level. The dreaming unconscious is a centre in our being which is so much older, wiser, stronger, and more far-seeing than waking consciousness. Dreaming lucidly helps the human consciousness examine itself in dramatic, exciting, and important ways. Incubating lucid dreams opens us to new ideas, feelings, emotion and experiences.

12. Intensive Journal Dream Technique : A beautiful and effective way of getting the meaning of dreams is that of Progoff 1, a Jungian psychologist, who has an unusual Journal approach to integrating the conscious and subconscious levels. His weaving of conscious and depth level -- through 18 exercises in the Journal Workshop -- utilities and develops twilight images (images which emerge in dreams and between waking and sleeping). The technique he uses for dreams follows:

• Keep a dream log.
• Place importance on series of dreams. Select one to reenter.

__________

1. Ira Progoff. At a Journal Workshop. Dialogue House Library, New York, 1975. Reproduced with permission.

• Carry it forward, let the images come.
• Write up the experience and feelings.
• Ask any key questions which come to you.
• The dream may lead you to other sections of the Journal, such as Dialogue, Intersections,or Meditation.
• Then draw together all the movement of your life as unfolded up to the present. Hold it in your right hand. This is your conscious awareness of your life.
• Now take in your left hand the combined movement of your dreams and twilight imagery. This symbolizes your unified inner nonconscious life.
• Balance each in relation to the other by letting them dialogue. Let them equalizes as the interior balancing takes place.
• Record and describe as fully as you can the new integrative synthesis.

13. Looking for the Social Dimension of a Dream :

Procedure
`Community’ may refer to our relationships, family, school or work settings of society. Choose one or more of the questions given below to facilitate reflection on a dream from a social perspective.

• How does this dream call me to foster the growth of the community? Is there some way through this dream that my family or community is asking something of me?
• Have I recently experienced conflicts or confrontations in family or community settings?
• How might this dream be putting me in touch with my social rights and responsibility?
• Have I recently received affirmations or signs of esteem for my talents from family or community members?

14. Asking for a Confirming Dream:

Procedure

1. Ask for a dream the following night to clarify whether your attitude to this dream is correct or not. Do the dream work on the new dream, keeping your mind on your question.
2. Continue to be alert about your dreams in the following days for confirming signs.

Some further helps in getting the meaning of dreams are attending a dreams are attending a dream workshop, reading god books on dream: See the bibliography at the end of the chapter, join an on-going dream group, or work on your dreams with a dreamwork partner you select.

See the Box on how to grow with dreaming.

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