Dreaming into the New Year: How a Dream Practice Can Kickstart Your Creativity and Energize Your New Year
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
By Bonnie Buckner, PhD
Author, The Secret Mind: Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform Your Life
Winter is around the corner, and with it a new year, giving us a moment to reset and create the space for new opportunities.
As a creative dreamwork expert, I find with clients that one of the greatest challenges to creativity is the pressure to get things done. This pressure to produce and complete long to-do lists belongs to the externalization phase of creativity, and is characterized by constant activity. While this is an important aspect of creativity, it comes second to ideation. Ideation is the internal phase which requires unstructured time away from the activity of making. Time when we pause, look inside, and allow our minds to drift… and dream.
The long nights of winter mean more time sleeping which opens us to dreaming. Dreaming is very nexus of our creativity. Not only does dreaming and creative insight share the same neural processing system called the default network, dreaming puts us in strange scenarios with unexpected experiences that elicit new ideas and perspectives.
Catching the new ideas of dreams is as simple as creating a dreaming practice. Whether you already have a robust dream life, or if you don’t remember your dreams, by setting up a dreaming practice you will not only begin to remember your dreams more frequently, they will become increasingly elaborate as you begin to interact with them.
A dream practice begins by getting a dream journal – one that you really enjoy and look forward to filling with your ideas. Writing, more than using your phone, will help you to remember your dreams and capture all the unusual aspects that auto correct tends to change. Keep the journal by your bed, with a pen, and when you wake, write down anything and everything you remember, without stopping to ask if it makes sense or not. Lingering in that dreamy half-wake space a bit longer is a juicy creative time, so be sure to also capture any reflections that arise in that space as well.
Pausing is an integral part of renewal. Whether it is about creative projects at work, or the creative project of the individual self, without pausing we begin to repeat old ideas or just run out of inspiration. Dreaming provides a natural pause each night when we can pull ourselves away from output, and enjoy the rich, creative input from the resources of our inner landscape.
Starting a dream practice, as we wind down the current year, can be the perfect time to create this new habit. Choosing to pause and reflect is exactly what the season around us is doing. Putting the intention to capture the new insights waiting to appear sets us up to ring in a very creative new year.
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