Consciousness researchers, psychotherapists, and neuroscientists have used several major vehicles to explore the vast reaches of the human mind—meditation, hypnosis, drugs, biofeedback, free association, and even brain imaging devices. But in many ways, dreams have been the most useful. Despite their bizarre narratives and puzzling imagery, dream reports are fairly easy to obtain from anyone in a sleep laboratory or through dream diaries.

The night's first period of dreaming generally begins 90 minutes after you fall asleep. The neurons at the base of your skull start to fire a random barrage of high-voltage impulses that unleash a cascade of potent chemicals pouring into your forebrain. There, your visual and motor centers are stimulated, triggering memories that are presented and combined in original, vivid, and often baffling ways. Immediately, your brain's mind creates a story that will make sense of these fragments, either providing a script that has waited patiently for the material that would allow it to surface or producing a narrative on the spot that matches—as best it can—the images and activities that have been kindled.

Sometimes these stories reflect basic problems in living with which you have wrestled for years; at other times they reflect the events of the past few days or hours, some trivial, some consequential. And in still other instances, as far as we know, the mind's search for meaning produces what seems to be little more than a jumble of disparate pictures and events. This process of tale telling and story-making is remarkably similar to what transpires when you use language while awake. Dreams can be thought of as a language of the night.

Some tribal groups spoke of the “dreamtime”—a sacred or heroic era from the past that can only rarely be obtained in the present. Dreamtime can be evoked through nighttime dreams, through daytime visions, and through rituals involving storytelling, singing, dancing, and painting. Here we use the term to refer to the thoughts, feelings, and images that are arranged into narrative form while we are asleep. But it is important to recall that its use by native people is broader, referring to more concepts and experiences than those found in nighttime dream content.

The mental and emotional processes involved in dreamtime are similar in many ways to the thoughts and feelings experienced during wakefulness. People who were asked to make up a dream while awake produced accounts that judges could not discriminate from written reports of their nighttime dreams.

When you record your dreams, you write a report that typically connects a series of action-oriented images that are usually visual. Many scientists (including myself) believe that these reports can help you to understand your behavior, experiences, and intentions. Many psychotherapists are convinced that their clients will benefit from an understanding of their dreams because, on reflection, dream activities appear to be metaphors for our waking concerns. And it is often helpful to find a metaphorical image or activity for a personal problem.

Some writers, artists, and other Creative people have made deliberate use of their dream narratives and images in their work. An even larger number of individuals have claimed that their scientific, technological, athletic, or artistic breakthroughs resulted from dreams that were serendipitously recalled.

Although dreaming is a natural talent easily available to everyone, it has been proven that dreaming abilities can be developed to yield better results.  In my experience, dreamers can be trained systematically in a series of specific dream skills.  Although every dreamer is unique, most dreamers will follow this general progression of skills as their experience level increases.

DREAM RECALL

The ability to remember a dream - specifically to retrieve it from memory and bring it to the conscious mind.  This skill improves from recalling mere fragments to daily recall of complete complex narrative dreams.

DREAM RECORDING

The technique of recording a dream - usually by translating the psychic experience into words and committing them to written form.  As part of the record include the date a title and any previous day's highlights.

DREAM DIAGRAMING

The technique of analyzing a dream into its constituent key components, usually its characters, objects, environments, actions and feelings.

DREAM PROJECTION

The method of taking another's dream as one's own and associating one's own meanings and reactions, cognitively and affectively.  This approach facilitates the sympathetic sharing of dreams in groups.  Popularized by Montague Ullman.

DREAM INTERVIEWING

The method of questioning the dreamer to learn what the key symbols mean to the dreamer.  Popularized by Freud and Jung.

DREAM INCUBATION

The technique of programming your dream mind to respond to particular topics and questions posed by the conscious mind before sleep.

DREAM DIALOGING

The method of letting dream characters "speak" their own messages through the dreamer in conducive role-playing settings.  Popularized by Fritz Perls and the Gestalt school.

DREAM RE-ENTRY

The ability to go back into a dream and recreate the same mental reality, letting its forces interact in new directions, combinations and resolutions.  Explicated in various modes by Strephon Williams.

DREAM TRANSLATION 

The technique of allowing the dream mind itself to interpret the dream in the hypnagogic state of the conscious mind.

DELPHI DREAMING

The technique of instant incubation whereby the dreamer enters a quasi-trance state, suspends the rational mind, and summons up dream mind responses to specific topics.

LUCID DREAMING

The skill to become awake and aware in one's dreams.  Initial lucidity usually occurs spontaneously.

PROGRAMMED LUCIDITY

The skill to consciously control one's dream experiences, including induction and maintenance.  The degree of control ranges from dream ego responses, to bodily movements, to complete control of the entire dream.