“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” – Vincent Van Gogh
We can find the word ‘dream’ quoted an innumerable number of times by the greatest people humanity has ever produced. But what actually is a dream? Why we dream in our sleep? What makes us wonder about the surreal dreams every morning when we transition from sleep to wakefulness? What elements constitute our dream screenplay?
To answer some of these questions, I started capturing my dreams every single day. How do I capture it? Simple, I write down whatever I remember in those first few minutes of wakefulness. Over time, I noticed that we remember our dreams and can write them down as vividly as possible during the first 2-3 minutes of wakefulness (transition period). Apple Inc. has made my life much easier by producing the Notes app which wakes up instantly when I tap on my iPad screen, rushing to write down the rapidly escaping dream sequences.
Now that I have enough scribbles of all those weird dreams, I started my analysis to find answers if I find any, from the data. I use my journal entries from Day One to find any correlations between my dreams and my memories.
- Dreams – Recent past (events and information from the past week)
- Dreams – Life’s intense episodes
- Dreams – Inputs (which I discuss elaborately in I/O Project article)