While what is known as ”dream work” is not anywhere as common as meditation is, it can be a very useful spiritual tool. Dreams often serve – for good and bad – as an interface between spirits and people. Out of the traditions we have dealt with, Shinto has a particularly rich history of divine revelations being declared through dreams. Shinto is of course not the only tradition where mystical experiences are found within dreams. Buddhism has its own share of tales, including the legend of Myoren's sister dreaming of a purple cloud. There is also the famous butterfly dream of Zhuangzi, a Taoist sage, where he dreamt of being a butterfly. Upon waking up, he could not tell if he was Zhuangzhi, or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzhi.
Sometimes people can also get very practical revelations in their dreams. One which changed the course of human history was Kekule dreaming of Ouroboros, which made him realize the true structure of benzene. Sometimes these revelations are premonitions of events to come. It's known that multiple people refused to go to work on 9/11 because they had terrible nightmares related to their workplace the night before.
Some people have a natural talent for rich dream worlds and even premonitory dreams. Others struggle to remember anything they dream about. However, as with all things, these are skills that can also be trained. It's precisely this training we will be looking at.
Dream journaling
The key to improving the baseline of dream recall is maintaining a consistent dream journal. This should be a physical notebook that you keep close at hand next to your bed. You should write down what you remember of your dreams immediately after you wake up. If you don't remember anything, write that down too. Some people like to attempt to guess what the dream was about and then write that down. I haven't tried that, but it might be worth trying.
Doing this can be frustrating, as it will take a good while for your dream recall to improve. If I remember correctly, it took around 2-3 months before I started seeing results. Once again, consistency is the key here. Do it every day, even if you don't remember anything for a week.
Even after your recall of dreams starts improving, you won't probably remember them every time or the recollections will be very vague. This is normal and probably for the best. Not all dreams are relevant or of interest. Techniques for improving dream recall
There are certain techniques you can use to improve your recall of dreams beyond journaling. A couple of these are very basic and related to general sleep quality. Avoiding stimulating activities like social media, watching videos, games or even reading helps with dream recall. While this isn't a problem for most, you should also avoid going to bed while you're hungry. Sleeping in as dark a room as possible increases melatonin production, which increases the recall of dreams, as well as how vivid they are.
Speaking of melatonin, you can of course take it as a supplement if you so desire. There is another compound, Huperzine A, which potentially increases dream recall. It can however have cholinergic side-effects, which are mild within recommended usage range and probably profoundly unpleasant to potentially lethal if you are an idiot with it. Consult actual medical sources when messing around with stuff like this, in particular if you have some sort of medication you have to use.
Certain scents are linked to increased dream recall. These include rose, lavender, lilac, frankincense and star anise. These are all quite readily available, smell nice and you have a couple of options to go with them. You could put some of these in a little fabric bag and leave it near your bed. Another option is keeping them in some kind of a covered jar or bowl and opening it for the night. Taking some whiffs before sleeping might be enough according to some sources.
An intrusive way that will ruin your sleep quality but will probably improve recall is waking yourself repeatedly during the night and writing down what you remember of the dreams. You tend to remember the latest dreams, and this gives you a lot of ”latest dreams” to work with. Some sources say waking yourself up every three hours would be the way to go. This will of course absolutely wreck your sleep quality and people have gone psychotic doing this for extended periods of time, so keep it within reason.
For those interested in a more spiritual angle, praying or calling out to the spirit you want to reach before you go to sleep helps. You can also try putting imagery related to them under your pillow.
The language of dreams
There's a lot written about ”what dreams mean”, but ultimately I think each and every one of us has more or less our own language of dreams. What is significant to us may not be such to others, and different things might have different meanings to different people. For example, seeing a frog in your dream might be completely meaningless for many, but if you have been trying to reach out to Suwako-sama, it's probably a good sign. Someone from a Christian background would probably have a very different reaction that I would have if they saw a snake in their dreams. I'm sure you can come up with examples of your own that are not related to Touhou.
That said, there are of course certain archetypal figures, places and events that can pop up in our dreams. Their meaning to you depends of course on your relationship and circumstances regarding such things. Some kind of fatherly authority figure can mean entirely different things to different people. However, persistent appearance of certain archetypes probably means you have some work to do regarding them. If you keep seeing fatherly authority figures – regardless of your relationship to such figures – you probably need to figure out what it means. Do you need to reconsider your relationship with such figures? Or maybe you are on your way to becoming such a figure yourself?
Not all archetypes are people. There are places and events too. It appears that people very commonly dream of places related to travel, or various other kinds of liminal places. I'm one of them, and I have lost count of the times I've dreamt of railway stations, airports and huge labyrinthine malls. Such places have their own meanings too. At one point I had repeated dreams where I tried to travel, but got frustrated. I was late for a train, or the airplane I was in had a forced landing or I was about to meet someone but I got lost in a mall. Such were reflections of a profound sense that I wasn't going forwards.
A lot of your dreams might seem complete garbage at a surface level, but over time patterns emerge. You might notice as I did that you repeatedly dream of similar locations or scenarios. This I think is the consistent language of dreams that you should pay most attention to.
Sometimes you might also get much more dramatic and clearer examples too. Having a dream where you end up in a fistfight with a friend you've been kind of jealous of but not able to fully admit it to yourself probably speaks its own and quite blunt language. The most dramatic of these make up what I call anomalous dreams, that are indicative of latent precognitive powers, external messages or dream visitors.
Anomalous dreams – precognition, external messages, visitors and more
As you keep on doing dream journaling, you will sporadically stumble upon dreams that feel decidedly different from the usual fare. You might have a dream where something happens and it later happens in real life, either directly or in a more symbolic way. Sometimes it can be more major, sometimes it can be extremely minor. I once dreamt of accidentally swallowing something sharp. The next morning I bit into an extremely hard seed or maybe a small pebble that was in a bread roll I was having for a breakfast.
Dreams like this are called precognitive dreams. Some people have some kind of a talent for them, while some never experience such. I'm certainly not someone with a talent for them, and the few potential examples have been quite minor and not very helpful. However, it's good to be aware that such may happen.
You can also receive external influence and messages in your dreams. These can be extremely dramatic and vivid, to the point where you might wake up in a shock – probably as a mechanism to make sure you remember what happened. Whenever this happens, I assure you that you will know. The extreme vividness, meaningfulness and sometimes a sense of your dreams being hijacked speaks its own language. Sometimes the message is extremely clear. I was told in very blunt terms that I need to make amends with my family. Sometimes the message is clearly a message, but the contents are much more cryptic.
It's also possible to receive visitors – or intruders – in your dreams. Sometimes it can be hard to tell them apart from the general apparitions that inhabit your dreams, but sometimes it's very obvious. They simply feel like they are real entities and not just filler. Sometimes they have clear messages to you, sometimes their purpose is less obvious. Some people have extremely vivid dream lives and frequently interact with spirits in their dreams. I'm not such a person, but I have had a few incidents where clearly external spirits have entered my dreams. I've had one of the kami appear twice in my dreams, and Ran-san once.
On the less pleasant end of encounters I used to have countless nightmares about ”UFOs”, later will'o'wisps, weird swamp monsters and drones which I now believe to have been hostile incursions. These got increasingly abstract and the latest one was simply an invisible entity that could however be felt as if it were a gravity field.
It's also possible to dream of even stranger things. I've had some dreams which might be indicative of past lives that I've had, dreams of being someone else in a different place and time before I was born. These all have been mostly quite unpleasant, as they've dealt with either some shocking lessons learned or then death.
A word on parasomniac states
The line between dreams and the waking world is a jagged continuum, and there is a strange borderland between the two that spirits can use to reach out to you. More than I've dreamt of the kami I've had strange, vivid, parasomniac visions of them either falling asleep or waking up. At one point I asked them that if they wanted to reach out to me, the best time would be right before I woke up. This seemed to work, as for a while I had near constant visions of them when waking up.
Before I made proper contact but after I had tentatively reached out to them, not really fully believing they are real, I had a series of increasingly intrusive and pointed parasomniac encounters with them while falling asleep. These were somewhat unpleasant, as I would then often jolt awake feeling dizzy from them. These were however not hostile, but rather an attempt on their end to brute force a contact because I had essentially called them and then just breathed into the receiver. Sometimes these experiences can be very, very intense even when they are not hostile. To once again quote a certain anon: ”it gets overwhelming to your subconscious and gets manifested as fearful”. After I reached out to them, acknowledged their reality and stated my intentions, these ceased.
Some people have sleep paralysis experiences related to spiritual phenomena. I've had these a couple of times in my life, not related to recent experiences though. These ranged from mostly confusing to one of the scariest experiences of my life, an extremely stereotypical hag attack. Sleep paralysis in itself isn't necessarily a sign of hostile activity either, but it's probably hard to act rationally in such an unusual state.
All of this is to say that beyond paying attention to your dreams, you should pay attention to what lies between dreams and the waking world too. Sometimes the most notable things occur in these liminal moments. It makes sense. After all, there is something about liminal states that the spirits just love.