Writing long dreams; tips for writing dreams faster

**RaveCrazedDave** · 11-26-2016 02:57 PM

I'm no stranger to longer dreams; most dreams I have, seem to span days, weeks, even months in some cases, it is, in other words, quite normal for me to have dreams that are daunting to write down, and I often cannot record any dream without spending at least half an hour writing - not thinking about it, just purely writing. Tonight I had what I would consider to be my most dense dream, by which I mean while the time span of it wasn't really impressive, spanning not more than a month, I'm sure, the dream itself had a lot going on (perhaps because I slept about 13 hours, but hey); in the end, I took 40 minutes to write what I'd call a draft of the dream with about 90% of detail left off. This always feels very disappointing to me, and I always struggle with the idea of leaving off the detail, but I feel like if I didn't, I'd take about 2 hours or so to write it all, and frankly I just don't have that kind of time in the morning.

The question is: how do you deal with these kinds of dreams that are so big and so full of events you simply don't have the time to write them down in detail? Should I be thinking less about detail? I've always thought about writing major milestones, and later trust my subconscious to remember what happened in detail. Another think I considered was somehow using automatic writing to output these, since many reports show automatic writing to be much faster than normal writing, albeit with hard to control results; what are your thoughts about this?

Any help and opinions are much appreciated; thank you in advance.

**AstralMango** · 11-26-2016 09:40 PM

You can try jotting down a few key words or sentences about the dream. For me, seeing little key words about long dreams always brings the whole dream back to my mind. It might work for you too.

Just give it a try.

**TravisE** · 11-27-2016 11:10 PM

I know what you mean; I've kind of struggled with the same problem. As awesome as it is to record a whole slew of long, detailed dreams each night and read them later, I eventually got tired of spending three hours per day doing it. And I've tended to be kind of obsessed about recording everything I can remember: It's all-or-nothing, and I really don't want to leave out anything.

I haven't really found any “miracle solutions” to this. I've just had to find a way to accept some compromises. I usually use a tape recorder to note down everything I want immediately after waking from the dream, which is very quick. Then, when I have a chance (usually when I'm getting up to start the day), I type them into the computer, which is the fastest way I have to get it into text (even though doing so and then proofreading/revising with my perfectionistic self still often feels too slow). Maybe one of those fancy speech-recognition software packages could be useful, but I've never tried them.

More recently, I've finally just decided to let some things go and cut down on the number of dreams to record and just focus on the lucid dreams and the really interesting/valuable stuff and not worry much about the more mundane, not-so-stellar dreams. In the process, I've purposely reduced my dream recall a little bit so I have a more manageable amount of material to process most days. Despite being a bit lower nowadays, the amount of dream recall I have now is still more than sufficient for my needs.