Peeling The Dream

I am documenting my method for peeling aside the layers of my dreams in order to better understand them. I do tend to amuse myself by doing exactly that, whereby when I wake up remembering a dream, I get down to dissecting its contents as I remembered them. Of course, it is expected that some details fade from memory practically immediately, and the memory continues to decay, so it is useful to analyze the dream at the moment of recollection.

The thing I would do is recall as much of the dream as possible, then try to pay attention to each dream segment. From there on, I try to sift out which memory maps to each dream segment. For example, if I dream about a house with a river and a mountain nearby, the interior of the house can often be mapped to an interior I've seen in a movie, read about or just simply seen in real life. What comes next can be distilled further, like how the water is moving and what sort of emotion/experience it is reminiscent of. The process repeats itself till I become unable to reconcile the final dream segments. That's what I regard as somewhat original segments, in that they do not readily relate to a memory or previous dream.

Of course, this is not to say that the "original" segments (which probably are not) are of any particular significance. Except perhaps my rat dream and the other similar ones. Regardless, it is interesting to go through this exercise and realize just how much of a dream is really quite intrinsic however bizarre it may seem to be.