Overwhelmed by your dreams?

the Stuff Dreams are made of...
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Periodically, I get overwhelmed by my dreams. Specifically, I get overwhelmed by the sheer number of them. When I’m in a journaling groove, I remember anywhere from 3 to 4 dreams per night, and sometimes 5.

I average about 3 lucid dreams per week during this periods, or 12 per month, with my numbers sometimes spiking close to 20.

Over the years, I’ve been able to keep up this pace for about 3 or 4 months, and then mental exhaustion hits. I recently went four months straight of remembering 1-5 dreams per night and then, yesterday, nothing. Actually, for the last week my recall declined, despite the usual amount of sleep and effort.

On the one hand, I think that I psyche myself out. Typically, what happens is I have a destablizing lucid nightmare, or a series of dreams I can’t interpret.

Mostly, I just get overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do with all the dream reports. I feel like, between work and play, there isn’t time to interpret every dream I have. Obviously, some dreams are nonsense—the daily rubbish of my consciousness playing itself out. I don’t stress out about these dreams. I simply write them down and sometimes they have some little message and sometimes they don’t appear to say anything particularly important.

Then there’s the “Level 2” dreams…The dreams that clearly say something about me psychologically, but…once I get so many of these in a row, it seems impossible to actually meditate on or act on all the information.

Can anyone relate? What have you done?

Personally, I’ve noticed a big parallel from my attention to non-lucid dreams and my lucid dreaming success. If I ignore my non-lucid dreams, I don’t lucid dream as well.

In the past, I’ve tried to get over this problem by categorizing my dreams. By saying, basically: OK, this was a superficial dream, so I don’t need to pay attention to it. But, in practice, I’ve found that there aren’t hard boundaries. Superficial dreams contain important insights sometimes, just as highly archetypal “big” dreams will have superficial elements.

…?

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As long as they are written down, if it was me I wouldn’t worry about it. Anything important will reappear symbolically in dreams. It is a good idea to categorise the dreams like you are doing. Are you making a few notes at the bottom of the other dreams about what jumps out at you from the dream? what feels the most important and symbolic? Then you can refer back to them later, might even notice some things reoccurring in different ways.

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Yeah, one thing I try to regularly is read over dreams in, say, a week’s time and note any recurring themes or imagery.

I guess I’m being hard on myself—and, yes, it makes sense that anything I’m missing will come up again.

I suppose I fear that if I don’t listen to my inner self that it will stop talking me.

I know I’m also in a transition…I used to do dreamwork entirely in my dreams. Meaning, I would think that I had to follow up on some provocative imagery in my next lucid dream. But, of course, you can always take action in your life too by doing very ordinary things.

I recently read some advice (by psychologist Robert Johnson, I think) that, in interpreting your dreams, you ought to avoid a self-serving bias. Or, in other words, if you’re regularly interpreting your dreams to be all self-congratulatory, you’re probably not paying close enough attention because no one’s perfect.

I think that advice made me paranoid somewhat. I’m suddenly suspicious of my own intuitions about symbols and themes because I don’t want to be self-congratulatory. Sometimes, of course, dreams are reassuring—they don’t always tell you what you’re “doing wrong.” Quite the opposite sometimes.

Balancing self-skepticism with real intuition about your dreams is difficult.