What do you do with your dreams?

Hey y’all,

I have a very simple question for you: What do you do with your dreams? Do you remember your dreams? Do you write them down? Do they make it into your work? What do you think dreams are for? Tell me in the comments:

I started writing down my dreams as a teenager, after I got my hands on Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams. He collected his dreams by scribbling in his notebook the minute he woke from sleep. Over the years, I’ve been on and off again with dream logging — lately, I’ve been writing them down in my diary again after I finished another James Hollis book.

Hollis is a Jungian, so he believes dreams are a gift from the deepest parts of our soul. Here’s what he writes in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:

We do not summon dreams up. If you think so, try to order up a certain category of dream and see if the psyche pays any attention to you. But on an average of six times per night, we are visited by this other world, which is nonetheless our world. Such tremendous expenditure of energy is neither random nor lacking in purpose. Nature does not waste energy. Attending this meeting point of inner and outer worlds is the chief office of depth psychology, the mystical tradition of the world religions, and the daily task of each of us. From this meeting point, creative energies arise, revelation appears, and each of us is initiated into a larger, developmental spirituality.

Hollis is the first person I’ve ever read who is against the practice of lucid dreaming, because it defeats the whole purpose of dreaming, which he believes is to ask of these images that are served to us:

“Why has the psyche spoken to me in this way? What does it wish to tell me? What do I need to