Page 299 - Use Your Memory

CATCHING YOUR DREAMS
the northern sky, forming multicoloured words that looked like
the aurora borealis. For this you would need only two items from
any Peg System. Take, for example, the Alphabet System. In this
you would imagine that on the ice-floe with you was a gigantic and
hairy ape, shivering exaggeratedly in the cold with you and
thumping his chest to keep warm as an enormous bee buzzed in
and out of the multicoloured images you were writing in the sky.
(See illustration, page 84.) Note that although the Alphabet
System Image Word for the letter A suggested in chapter 9 is ace, it
is permissible, as here, to use an alternative of your own choice.
Attaching the Major Dream Images to your Major Key Word
System Memory Images in this way allows you to easily span the
different brain-wave states in which you find yourself when
asleep, when waking and when fully awake, thus enabling you to
remember that important and very useful part of your subcon-
scious life that so many of us hardly ever contact.
Numerous studies completed on people who have started to
remember their dreams show that, over a period of months, they
become more calm, more motivated, more colourful, more
humorous, more imaginative, more creative, and far better able to
remember. All of this is not surprising, for our unconscious dream
world is a constant playground for the right side of the brain,
where all of the Basic Memory Principles are practised to perfec-
tion. Getting in touch with these at the conscious level encourages
all connected skills to improve automatically.
If, as many people do, you become interested in this area of
self-exploration and improvement, it is useful to keep a dream
diary in Key Memory Word and Key Memory Image Mind Map
form (see chapter 23). This diary will give you constant practice in
all the skills mentioned and will become an increasingly useful
tool in your overall self-development. After a little practice you
may well find yourself both appreciating and creating literature
and art at levels you had not previously explored. For example,
Edgar Allan Poe first remembered and then used the more night-
marish of his dreams as the basis for his short horror stories.
Similarly, Salvador Dali, the surrealist artist, publicly stated that
many of his paintings were reproductions of perfectly remem-
bered images from his dreams.
It should now be clear to you that the development of memory
skills not only gives you the advantage of being able to remember
more than you used to but also encourages the total development
of the left and right hemispheres of your brain. This leads to a
general expansion of memory powers, a burgeoning of your ability