Summer is synonymous with daydreaming (from discovering new worlds, to having love affairs, to not going back to work); but also of nightmares (snakes, persecutions, falls, drowning, mazes…). Actually, nightmares are better remembered, as they are circular and repetitive thoughts, so it is always a good idea to know how to direct dreams.
Salvador Dalí, for example, used a technique called “dream incubation” that helped him direct and pre-program in advance what he wanted to dream. To do this, he held a spoon in his hands and when he fell to the ground, he woke up and put his creativity to work.
Guillermo del Toro was also inspired by a recurring dream he had since he was a child when filming Pan’s Labyrinth. Not to mention the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who said that the keys to The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde were “given” to him in a dream. As for Paul McCartney, he woke up one morning with the memory of having heard a melody in his sleep, he wrote it down and thus Yesterday, the immortal Beatles song, was born. “I woke up with a beautiful melody in my head,” McCartney confessed to Barry Miles for the biography Many Years From, which was published in 1968. “I got out of bed, sat down at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor, which brought me to an E minor 7th and eventually back to E. I really liked the melody but, since I dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I had written it”, said the singer and bassist about this song that since its creation has been covered by 2,200 artists.
Since Paracelsus began to write each of his dreams, as if it were a diary, there have been many who have discussed the best way to remember them. Among them, the Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro, vice director of the Brain Institute of the University of Rio Grande do Norte and author of The Oracle of the Night (Debate).
If it comes to remembering dreams, says Ribeiro, there are two key moments. The first is when going to sleep. According to this neuroscientist, you have to go to bed with an intention, thinking about what you want to dream, as the ancient Greeks, Egyptians or Sumerians dreamed or as the Yanomami and Amerindian peoples dream, trying to find answers. That is, induce sleep and, from there, let yourself be carried away by it. His second piece of advice is not to move when you wake up, but to stay still in bed, try to remember the dream and pull the thread. And then write down those memories or record them.
This same technique is applied firsthand by Clara Tahoces, who has just published Sueños. Interpretation Dictionary (Firefly). In the case of this expert, whose book has already gone through twenty editions, she usually writes down the fragments that she remembers in a notebook. “As you get used to writing down your dreams, more and more memories come back to you,” she explains. “It is very important, indeed, not to run out of bed, even to set the alarm clock a little earlier to have that time. You can also use a recorder so you don’t turn on the light and stay up all night”, suggests the author of 50 essential dreams (Círculo de lectores).
In Sueños, Tahoces dedicates a chapter to creative dreams. The Russian scientist Dimitri Mendeleev, for example, first formulated the periodic table of elements thanks to a dream. In it, he saw a table structure with rows and columns. When he woke up, the first thing he did was transfer that data to a piece of paper.
Psychologists acknowledge that it is more difficult to remember pleasant dreams. In fact, when you are lucky enough to be dreaming of a pleasant situation and something suddenly wakes you up, “it seems that a fortune has been stolen from us”, as Borges wrote in a poem, to later note that dreams are “treasures made of shadows ”.
When it comes to having creative dreams, a good time is during twilight, in the light sleep that comes from falling half asleep. The first step is to choose the subject you want to dream about (the script of the novel that cannot be unstuck, the mathematical formula that is yet to be discovered, etc.) “There is no mathematical formula. A home ritual is to write a question on a piece of paper, for example, how or where should the plot of my novel progress?, and place it under the pillow”, suggests Tahoces. “It will not always work, of course, but if you do it many times and you keep thinking about the question, so that it is your last dominant thought before going to sleep, very possibly you will have dreams related to the question that worries you” , Add. “You’re not going to have the complete answer, obviously, but maybe some ideas or inspiration,” he concludes.
As for lucid dreams, they are not available to everyone, as they require training. Basically, it means to be dreaming and realize that you are not passively observing, but creating an experience. In other words: be aware of dreaming, but make decisions and guide the dream to where you want the dream to evolve. It is an experience that almost anyone has experienced at some time, but it is difficult to carry out voluntarily.
Tahoces admits, for example, that it took him two months to have his first lucid dream. According to this expert, there are exercises that can be carried out during the day in order to train what happens in the dark. For example, when observing something incongruous during the day (the two examples given by Tahoces are bumping into someone you know on the street that you haven’t heard from for a long time or seeing three hearses go by, one behind the other) you have to ask yourself if it is a dream and verify it, even if the answer is that it is not a dream. “When this question is incorporated many times into everyday life, it ends up fixing itself in the brain, in such a way that you also question yourself during your sleep when you see something shocking,” she explains. “It is when you realize that you are dreaming, for which there are several techniques, such as counting the fingers of the hand (“because in dreams there is always more or less”, he says) when you can intervene in what you are imagining, direct the plot and even incorporate characters”, he reveals.
Regarding whether dreams are different in summer than in winter, this expert points out that no, what is dreamed does not depend on the season of the year, but on the dreamer’s circumstances, that is, if he is more or less stressed.
According to Tahoces, there are about 5,000 recurring elements that he usually dreams of, which can be subdivided into 17 categories (money, sexuality, friendship, family, love, work and studies, luck, health, hidden enemies, children, self-improvement, etc.) ” The category with which one dreams depends on the mental situation. What worries us on a day-to-day basis is what is released in dreams, ”he recalls.
“What would you recommend to those who claim not to dream?” Tahoces repeats the question. “There are people who think that they don’t dream, but we all dream every night and not just once, but three to five times. So I would recommend that, if you don’t remember your dreams, write down how you feel emotionally when you wake up and keep writing down the small progress until your dreams begin to take shape ”, he answers.