No matter whether you believe that dreams can help you solve problems, give insights into what’s to come into your life, or simply are strange jumbles of emotions and images from your day…they do offer an interesting look at your unconscious and can be great fodder for analysis or creative writing.
We all dream every night…about once every 90 minutes or so. And even if you’re lucky enough to remember your dreams immediately upon waking, most times the details quickly fade and don’t get stored in an accessible memory bank.
Instead of having your child attempt to wake up enough to write down their dreams first thing in the morning or by the light of the moon, give them a voice recorder to save their recollections immediately upon waking.
It doesn’t matter whether you use an old cassette recorder (or mini-cassette recorder), a smartphone (there really ARE apps for that!), or a snazzy newfangled device like the LiveScribe Echo Smartpen…just getting kids in the habit of recording the way their brain processes information while asleep can improve their intrapersonal awareness. Plus, there’s no more fun breakfast conversation than the crazy dreams each family member had the night before.
When you tuck your kids in at night (with a recorder on the bedside table or next to their bed on the floor), before you turn out the light talk to them about things they might want to record when they wake up:
- key points of the plot
- any dialogue from the dream
- who was in it?
- any moods/feelings
- where did it take place?
- did anything stand out as strange?