LMG wrote:Back in the 1980s I worked with a large management consultancy firm, and part of the training involved a basic foundation in psychology. I was very lucky in that when I was going through the in-house programme, it had been effectively taken over by Jungian psychologists, so we got a lot of teaching I found fascinating but which was not long after determined to be not entirely relevant to downsizing, outsourcing, and rationalisation!
Anyway, at the time I followed up the interests in Jungian psychology by means of one of the local community/Further Education colleges, The City Literary Institute.
[And in a fine example of the process of creative career destruction, I later left the consultancy to teach at the same institution, which was the message nearly all my studies was driving home to me:
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2016 ... eas/nexus/
But that's a whole other non-dream related story...]
While I was studying at the City Lit, one Jungian course I took was in dream interpretation, it was for 12 weeks at the end of 1989. I sat one evening a weekly in a circle of about a dozen or so students and talked about our dreams. In order to have material to discuss, and there being no internet to blog on, we were encouraged to keep a dream diary.
So I bought one. But it remained blank and empty throughout the course. I got to hear other people's dreams and got really good at interpreting them in terms of Jungian archetypes and so forth, but my own A4 ruled notebook remained unblemished. I tried all the tricks suggested by the course tutor, but by the end I had not contributed a single dream.
I was sad about this. Why wasn't I dreaming? The tutor made me promise to continue the project of trying to record my dreams, which I did. SIx months later I had my first recalled dream! It was a doozy!
So the first year, 1990, I wrote down 9 dreams. The next year I recorded 33 dreams, and in 1992 it took off - I was recording an average of one or two dreams every three nights, so over 250 dreams in two years.
I kept at it in the following decades, although those were the two biggest years for dream harvesting. In 2006 I recorded no dreams, and for the following few years I seldom recorded more than ten each year. Lately it has increased again, and in 2020 I wrote down nearly 70 dreams.
Doesn't that indicate that the more you record them, and then remember them, the more that you have and remember?
I thought that if I wrote them down, I would forget about them. But they increased.