Thread: A Practical Introduction to Dream Cartography

What is Dream Cartography

Dream Cartography is a modification of Dream Journaling. The idea behind DJ is to keep journal of dreams and try to write down dreams as detailed as possible. The problem is that this proccess usually emphasize plot of the dream: often you can found DJ with amazing details about who talk with, what dreamer and DCs did while dreaming and so on. It indeed trains recall but the plot is not one thing that deserves dreamer's attention.

Another one - dream world itself and its geography, so Dream Cartography is a technique which suggest to emphasize dreamer's surroundings and a place where dream takes place over dream's plot.

Basic features

• Exploring your own dream world is fun and interesting.
• It may appeal to people who enjoy exploring and researching.
• Comparing to the number of possible plots, the number of places is much limited (in non-lucid dreams), so it is possible for frequent ones to serve as dream signs.
• The goal to explore dream world gradually becomes incentive of your's dream counterpart, and you may start to see dreams about places where you have never been (or just do not remember) or have not been for a while (often in adulthood we tend to visit some places more rare than when we were children).
• Dream Cartography do not exclude Dream Journaling, it may be a supplement to this.
• Dream Cartography allows to use more effective your non-lucid dreams which usually are majority. More, for creating first draft of your map you can start with already recorded dreams. If you already have long DJ with a lot of entries - that's great. You can process them right away and draw a draft of the map based on this dreams.
• Useful side-effect of this practice is that one start to remember other dreams which took place in the same place.

Advanced features

• Interesting feature of dream maps is that some elements are rather common among dreamers.
• Dream maps can be shared and discussed: it is one of the best features!
• Dream Journaling significantly improves dream recall: some of the DJs features very detailed descriptions of events happened during a dream. Dream cartography also has significant influence over dreaming. It deserves own articles on this topic, so I will only outline it briefly here.
  
  A lot of dreamers perceive dreams as a set of non-connected or loosely connected dream scenes which changes oftenly. At the other side, some may notice scenes which are reoccuring from time to time, and even more - they may often get from one place to another using the same route. Example: when I was younger I often had dreams which took place in small town which I used to visit in real life. In dreams I usually went there by train. When I processed my old DJ for creating list of places, I realized that this route was quite stable, and more - after train station in this town there a couple of others which I also visited several times.
  
  So the more we see dreams the more patterns we find, the more dream scenes become connected and "ordered". It become to make sense. This process is somewhat natural: if one have a good recall then in his, say, fifties (s)he will know a lot of places in her/his dreams and how they are connected to each other. Dream cartography allows to force this process of dream space ordering and (as ultimate goal) give dreamer a complete map within reasonable period of time.
  
• Many people (both "skeptics" and "mystics") agree that dreams are key to one's inner self. Dream cartography gives dreamer a sane, simple and fun method to explore it. Even if you do not know what aspect of your personality is represented by this cute castle on the hills, you at least know how to get there!

Which dreams are most useful

One of the good points of dream cartography is that the main source are non-lucid dreams, though some will be better than others. The best ones are those which took place not only inside but also outside because these dreams allow to judge about where different elements of the dream world are situated relatively to each other.

At first it will be hard to notice such connection because often in dreams we move from one dream scene to another by sudden change of it. During practice of dream cartography brain figures out (or creates - hard to say really) these connections.

How to start

As with DJ there are no universal way how to create and update a dream map, so I will provide general guidelines and share my own experience.

First you should to process dreams you already have and create list of the places which you will put onto map later. Alternatively you can start over and put them right away if you want - it may be different for everyone. Personally, I am lazy and first write dreams into DJ and once in a while update my map.

DJ entries can be slightly modificated for dream cartography's purposes. You should add to each a title and/or description of place where dream took place and transits (if any). Transits are objects which led to sudden change of dream scene. For example, you touched a statue in dream and was teleported - this is a transit. Or you went through mirror and found yourself somewhere else - this is also transit.

If you have have drawing skills, you may also draw this place.

Personally I keep DJ as Excel file with five columns: date, title, brief description of the plot, places and transits (the last is usually empty). My dream map is vector image - I use open-source editor Inkscape.

General layout

Dream map usually built around one's home (i.e. it's dream counterpart) because this is the place which one usually dreams very often about. Around Home usually there is an area which called Home City. It includes school, college, work and other typical places which we often visit in dreams. Also there are may some other towns (usually smaller than Home city).

Borders of dream world are represented by impassable obstacles like ocean and mountains. Often before such obstacle there is a river.

Another important note is that dream world is actually multilayered. We make map for a "main" layer but there are few others. One of them - subway which a lot of people see in dreams. It also may be explored if one desires. Even "below" (we need to remember is that it is not actually below, it is how we interpret some aspects of our mind) are situated layers which shamans call "Lower worlds". One rarely visits this "worlds" until he is mystic of some sort, drug addict, heavily sick or just advanced dream cartographer who is interested in what else his inner self have.

Probaly there are should be layer perceived as being "above" main layer but as with "lower" ones they should not interest us for now.

Last important topic which should be noted is that for historical and traditional reasons north and south are switched on the dream maps. Of course, you are not bound to do this .

How detailed map should be

It is the same as for question "How detailed dream journal should be" there is no common answer. Personally I make one global map and later I intend to make separate maps for a Home city (with streets), a couple of small towns which are represented with small icons on general map, and subway.

Epilogue

I hope this small tutorial was interesting and will help you to build your own dream map if you decide to give it a try.