Is it worth recording your dreams?

It definitely is. It can give you greater insight into your life’s problems and if you are creative, as you’ve heard (a writer, painter, musician…) you can use your dreams as material for your work.

I am both a writer and painter and have used my dreams for both.

I would if I could remember them but that happens very rarely.

Your mileage may vary. Personally, most of my inspirations come when I’m awake but bored enough for my mind to start free-floating. My dreams tend to vanish instantly before recording them is possible though, so for someone like me, it wouldn’t help at all.

Of course, I might just be weird. :/

jerv:

I used to have really creative ideas as well when I was working atrocious, drop dead boring jobs… So I understand where you are coming from there.

Why bother recording? I remember them all anyway.

@Winter_Pariah How about a dream you really like but you only remember a little at the end of it?

@Mimishu1995 Every morning I wake up, I remember the dreams and nightmares from start to finish. At least enough of each dream to be certain that if there is a portion I can’t remember, then it’s relatively insignificant. It’s a lovely little mixed blessing.

I wish I had the discipline to record my dreams…what a novel they would be!

I used to try that, but they vanish away ever so slightly as the morning goes on, and I usually have other things to do right when waking up. And when I DON’T have anything to do, I’m just lazy. Might be a good idea though, I’d say give it a shot and see if it does anything for you.

Record nightmares & make a found footage horror movie…or don’t.

I never remember my dreams.

@ucme For people who have reoccurring dreams…The Boy with the Glowing Bat Face…Takes Manhattan…Again. Part IX.

Keith Richards keeps a recorder next to him when he sleeps. He woke up one night, recorded the riff for Satisfaction, fell asleep and forgot all about it. Yeah, I’d say there is value to recording things. :)

Hurrah! A GOOD question about dreams, that isn’t “I dreamed about my crush what does it mean?”!

I think it is worth it. Some of my dreams have also inspired creative writing, and some of them are just so much fun I wanted to dream them again. A few years ago I had a series of dreams, all different, in which I was leading a life very much like Indiana Jones. One in Cairo, one in Eastern Europe somewhere, even one on a tropical jungle island. I wish I’d kept notes about them.

Some time around 1998 or so I had a very vivid dream in which I was someone else, and I was travelling up through the USA with my wife and two teenage children. It was a sort of post-apolcalyptic scenario and we were on the run but I never saw who was pursuing us in the dream. I knew that we were headed for the Canadian border; there was a feeling that once we reached there we would be safe. At one point we sheltered for the night in a rusty old locomotive and I remember spreading out a map of the state to see where we were, and where we were going. That map was firmly imprinted on me and when I woke I remembered it clearly. So I looked it up in an atlas the next day and it was as plain as day; we were in North Dakota and headed straight for Winnipeg.

Many years later, in Second Life, I almost died of shock when I found the locomotive again, exactly as I remembered it in the dream.

Believing as I do that dreams often give us important clues about how we’re feeling, I find that going through the exercise of putting them down in words can sometimes help me figure that out.