I am jealous of my girlfriend.
She wakes up every morning with a great recollection of several dreams without making any particular effort.
Her dreams are always vivid, full of meaning and entertaining. And every time she turns to me with “what about you?”, I usually don’t have better than: “hmm, I can’t remember anything“.
This is starting to bother me for a couple of reasons.
👉 I don’t like the idea of not remembering anything from a 1/3 of my life
👉 Dreams are often random, absurd and ridiculous. That sounds like a fun way to start the day
👉 One of the very few dreams I could remember this year recently inspired an article. I want to tap further into this source of creativity for my personal projects
👉 Obviously, I am sick of not having a mind-blowing dream to tell when I wake up
In this newsletter, I’ll put aside my ego-driven motivations and focus on the third reason above: using dreams for problem solving and creativity.
What you will learn:
Dreams have inspired creatives, innovators, artists and inventors since the beginning of times
How I am going to get better at remembering my dreams. Hopefully I’ll find good ideas and solutions to my problems in them
How I intend to go further and learn how to control my dreams to make sure they are geared towards problem solving and ideation
Cheers,
Auguste
From Google to Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory: Big ideas that came from a dream
The list of inventions, scientific breakthroughs, movies, books, songs and other creative endeavours that came from a dream is breathtaking:
Google [technology]: The co-founder Larry Page got the inspiration for the initial algorithm from a dream at the age of 22
The Terminator [movie]: James Cameron dreamed of "a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire" while suffering from fever in Rome during the final cut of Piranha II. It directly inspired the movie
Periodic Table of Elements [scientific breakthrough]: Dmitri Mendeleev, while struggling to correctly orient the elements he recalls seeing them in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, he immediately wrote them down on a piece of paper. This gave the periodic table foundational to current understanding of chemistry.
Yesterday, by The Beatles [song]: Paul McCartney woke up one day with a melody in his head. Assuming it was coming from a vague memory from childhood, he played it to several people and asked them if they could identify it. It turns out, he had made up a new song
Persistence of Memory [painting]: Dali was able to harness his dream landscape and hallucinogenic imaginings – without psychotropic drugs to paint what he would call “hand-painted dream photographs”. My favourite painting.
etc.
Amazing, right?
Imagine what big idea could be hiding in your dreams? It might not change the course of humanity but it could potentially change your personal life.
I know it sounds very speculative. But one thing is for sure, if you can’t remember your dreams (like me 🥲), you won’t remember any valuable idea from them.
How to better remember your dreams
So, how am I going to get better at remembering my dreams and access creative ideas?
Well, Jim Kwik, a renowned brain performance and memory improvement expert, has a protocol that I am going to follow for the next coming weeks.
D for Decide: The night before you sleep, make a conscious decision that you will recall your dream.
R for Record: The act of recording trains your mind to be more sensitised to your dreams. Use a dream journal that you can leave on your night stand. Grab it as soon as you wake up and start writing your dreams while they are still fresh.
E for Eyes: Keep your eyes shut. Dreams can quickly disappear when you wake up. If you keep your eyes closed when you wake up it can help you remain focused on the dream and not be distracted by disturbances from the environment.
A for Affirm: Affirm that you will remember. Set the intention firmly and repeat outloud before sleeping: “I will recall my dreams”.
M for Manage: Manage your sleep. Establish proper sleep hygiene to ensure you get restorative sleep full of dreams. This part should be fine for me since I have spent years optimising my sleep thoroughly: https://medium.com/@auguste.byiringiro/the-science-backed-routine-i-wish-i-knew-when-my-sleep-was-messed-up-afd1f64d0b36.
S for Share: Talk about your dreams to others. The more you acknowledge your dreams and bring them to the surface, the easier it will be to remember them.
Beyond dream recollection: Lucid dreaming
I like to go the extra mile.
Better dream recollection is only the first step for me.
I am hoping it will give me access to plenty of cool ideas to implement in my life.
But what if no idea emerges? What if these ideas are not practical at all or useless?
I want to be able to control the problems I want to solve while dreaming and therefore the type of ideas I’ll get.
Therefore, lucid dreaming (taking control of your dreams while you are asleep) sounds like a natural next step.
After I am capable of remembering a couple of dreams every morning, I’ll start training myself to control my dreams using the steps described in the video below.
Quote of the week
Reality is wrong, dreams are for real