You Can be Great If You Really Want To

The main barrier to recalling and benefiting from dreams is that waking and dreaming memory aren’t connected nearly as well as they could be with greater intention, practice and focus. Making a relatively consistent effort to remember and especially to record your dreams will help your waking mind align and integrate your dream experience. It’s also an excellent way to increase imagination and intuitive capabilities which are both intimately connected with dreams. This alone should provide strong incentive.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO WANT IT:

First and foremost, you must feel that it will be useful to you, if not extremely valuable. Without this intention, motivation will soon disappear. More importantly, the desire acts as a subjective magnet which draws your dreams into memory.

FOCUS and ATTENTION:

Understand that dream recall is an inherent, natural human trait. That is why young children are quite in touch with their dreams, as are many native cultures, some of which even share their dreams with each other daily and base important life actions upon guidance they receive. Dream recall is like a mental muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. Without exercise it may shrink, but it is there if you decide to work it out again. So if your recall is poor, trust that it will come in time, and the trust itself will actually help since expectation is a powerful subjective tool.

BEDTIME PRACTICE:

Before sleep, reread your dreams from the night (or more) before. This allows you to begin to connect with your dream memory, and is also an opportunity to interpret your dreams and spot connections to the day’s events. Then, as you go to bed, clearly request (rather than command) yourself to remember any dreams when you awaken in the morning or during the night, especially ones that would be beneficial to you. Also remind yourself that it’s a simple, natural process that happens by itself anyway. You can also suggest to yourself to spontaneously awaken when you need to without using an alarm, since any strong external perception such as a loud noise can inhibit recall. This method works well with practice, but you may initially wish to set your alarm for 15 minutes after your suggested wake-up time, just to be safe. Whenever you awaken, keep your eyes closed (or shut them if already open) and remain as motionless as possible. If you moved since waking, return to your earlier body position. Gather as many images, impressions, feelings, or body sensations or waking thoughts as you can. A helpful technique is to think of it like fishing. Gently, cast out your intention to remember a dream, and wait a little to see what comes. As soon as you get anything, no matter how brief or vague they may at first seem, rise and immediately record (or write, draw, paint, etc.) it in a journal or speak into a tape recorder (which you keep bedside). You’ll be surprised at how much more you remember as you begin writing/speaking/drawing/painting/etc.

BE PLAYFUL, PATIENT, and PERSISTENT:

Although most people start having success the first week or two, dream recall is a mental muscle which may require some time to get back into shape. Try to maintain a relaxed and playful attitude of looking forward to your dreams while being willing to let them come all in good time. Trying too hard or being too serious can be limiting factors. Dream recall and motivation tend to come and go naturally in cycles and also depend upon what else is going on in your life, and on how much sleep you get, how much you exercise, etc.. Once you begin a period of focusing on recall, stick with it for at least a few days, because consecutive nights can have an additive effect.

A WEEKLY STUDY GROUP with a shared interest in dreams like the teleclasses offered through The DREAMS Foundation (www.dreams.ca) is unmatchable for sustained motivation, inspiration and plenty of intriguing surprises and insights.

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How to solve problems? This intriguing video shows a powerful combination of mind mapping and problem solving tools – easy, practical and effective. The punch line ideas start at 5:20 – they need some preparation. More material on problem solving, especially math problem solving, on www.scribd.com The music is a Concerto for Cembalo and Strings by Arnaud Condé (born 1990).

Flashes of inspiration are quite common and happens in practically all aspects of human life. But unlike a mathematical proof, these are often very personal, and cannot always be reconstructed by other people. By the way, it is a good idea to put down your thoughts in writing, for 90 percent of all good ideas get lost forever if they are not immediately jotted down. Also, not every good thought can be used immediately. Sometimes, ideas or inspirations are only fragments of a whole, which first have to be polished and supplemented with additional pieces. This is something that poets, playwrights and novelists do, they jot down parts for poems, stories, settings or characters as they occur, returning to them later to be developed and become a verse, a scene or a piece of dialogue.

However, for most of us, wonderful answers don’t just appear all by themselves. One of the most important prerequisites for creative work is to suspend automatic behavior and monotonous functions. The routine that says “this is the way its always been done” is the death knell for inspiration.

One of the most effective methods of creative thinking is brainstorming. Basically there are four rules to the method.

One – anything and everything can be said.

Two – the more ideas expressed, the better.

Three – No one should ridicule anyone’s idea.

Four – Any adaptation, improvements or combinations to the ideas presented is encouraged. The beauty of this technique is not to find exactly the right answer since there can be many answers to the problems – but to provoke new ideas that have previously not been thought of.

The most important and most difficult rule for such a communal sharing of ideas is – no criticism. This would immediately stifle the creative process and collective thinking of the group involved in the brain-storming. New ideas presented need not be explained or even defended. They must only be taken down spontaneously and in rapid sequence then, at a later stage, they can be evaluated by the entire team to find out if they are of use or not. Do you find that you are stuck in certain situations? Do you need to face up to new ideas? Then brainstorming may be just the right creative method for you.

Here’s an example to show how effective the technique can be while searching for a zip replacement for space suits, NASA designers employed a particularly open technique of idea generation. One participant would pick a word or term at random from the dictionary – for example “forest”. During the brainstorming session, he imagined walking through a forest with thorns getting stuck on his clothes. For the astronauts, the result was a type of fastener which thousands of thorn-like fibres hook into one another. The material was named Velcro. Today, it is not only a household name, it is used in space, in the military, in workshops –everywhere.

You need not have a group of people in order to brainstorm. You can do it on your own. Imagine in your mind that you have a group of advisors offering the pros and cons of an idea. Remember, you need to convince yourself that the answer or solution is already lodged somewhere in your memory. Take a walk along a beach or a garden to see how nature solves its problems, they may yet offer clues to yours.