Posted by Victoria on February 20, 1999, at 17:30:29
In reply to Re: A(-nother) sleep problem; help?, posted by Elizabeth on February 17, 1999, at 0:27:46
I rarely remember dreams, on or off medication. I recently tried a journalling technique that was amazingly effective, to my surprise, in generating vivid and useful dreams. The idea is to start up a dialogue with your dreams by choosing one problem or issue and asking your dreams to "comment" on it. You do this by, just before you go to sleep, writing a brief (1-2 sentence) statement of the problem or issue and then writing a one-sentence question about the issue to your dreams. It sounded a bit hoky to me, but I gave it a try. Nothing happened the first night, but the second night I had a very powerful dream (which unfortunately woke me in the middle of the night: not good for my insomnia). The dream has been very useful in therapy, but was so powerful and painful that I haven't repeated the technique since (and I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't have a supportive situation in which to deal with what dreams may come). But I've remembered a couple of other useful dreams since (without the technique or waking at night). There's no way of telling if it will work for anyone else, but that was my experience.
poster:Victoria
thread:2935
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19990201/msgs/3095.html