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When my children say their prayers before bed, they almost always ask God to bless them with good dreams. Such requests are typically absent in my own prayers, but after reading this, I’m now thinking maybe there is some wisdom in their supplications.

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Sep 12Liked by Johann Kurtz

Tips for increasing dreams from a heavy dreamer:

- Get enough sleep. One has to put in the hours. Dreaming requires expenditure of excess energy that must be recharged by the very act of sleeping.

- Keep warm. Studies show that an optimal body temperature is required. Personally, I find that being slightly on the hot side helps to stimulate weirder, more fascinating, recallable dreams.

- Take adequate vitamin B6 - for me, this is 50 mg of pyridoxine hcl from time to time.

- Upon waking, keep one's eyes shut and explore the faint echoes of the mind for ten minutes or more. Often there are residual threads of dreams that can be grasped to pull up whole memories. It's important to not look around or think about worldly things. Seek and wait. Checking one's phone is a big NO.

- Don't use an alarm. Instead, decide when to wake up and then wake up at that time.

- Personally, I found that loading up on creatine also helps, perhaps due to the extra ATP, but it's not absolutely necessary.

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author

Useful, thanks Jonathon

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Sep 12Liked by Johann Kurtz

The Job quotation is amazing. Ancient, earthy, true. Natural, preternatural, and supernatural.

I’ve had one dream that massively changed me. I know it was of God and is almost too special to me to share in writing.

Thanks for more great writing. Just started recommending your publication to my readers. God bless.

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Sep 13Liked by Johann Kurtz

That’s amazing to hear, I had a similar experience. God gave me a dream and in it pushed me to marry my wife. He even gave me the exact words I would propose with!

Those words are so special when I try to utter them to anybody except my flesh-and-blood family something always stops me from uttering the words in their entirety. We’ve been given something special so it’s nice to see we cherish the gift!

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author

Really appreciate the recommendation Cody

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I recall my dreams nearly every night; I became very interested in dreams during high school. I used to lucid dream, you can train yourself to do it. Typically in dreams, numbers and written text are amorphous, shifting, inconsistent. In a dream, if you look at a clock, look away, and then look back the time will be different than what you first saw. So start doing that in your waking life, do it consistently. You are conditioning yourself. You look at a clock, look away, look back and the time is the same: you know you are awake, if the time has changed you know you're dreaming. That's how I would lucid dream. You have to train yourself and do it regularly during waking hours so it becomes habitual. You can do a similar thing with something like drawing a mark on your hand. Draw a dot on your hand, take note of where it is, look away, and look back. Again, you can train yourself in your waking life to do this. In dreams the mark on your hand may change shape or location and you know you're dreaming. Same thing with dials, thermostats, things like that with small details. The details shift in dreams. If you train yourself in waking life to notice the consistent small details then you will be more likely to notice when you're dreaming. Another thing is light switches: again you train yourself in waking life by flipping the light switches when you enter a room, they typically work properly in waking life. Light switches are weird in dreams, they usually don't do anything, and when that happens you know you're dreaming. Keep a dream journal next to your bed, if you make a habit of writing down and recalling your dreams right when you wake up you will be more able to remember them in the future.

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author

Have adopted the dream journal. Will report back

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Sep 12Liked by Johann Kurtz

I also find that some of my best dreams have been at times with minimal phone usage, lots of praying, and lots of real life living. Camping. Mission trip to Mexico. My honeymoon. Times where my focus is very much on the present, but not overstimulated with algorithms. My subconscious can be bored in a good way. Then the rivers can run uphill.

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author

I've heard this from other people too - and this is going to be a major focus of my strategy

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Sleep is death. The Saints have revelatory dreams not because they cultivate dreams, but because they cultivate holiness.

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Your ideas,thoughts,feelings and intention are interesting but don't have this experience. Now I am a few months off 70 years old I actually spend only two to three hours of the night in actual sleep but I do not consider this a medical problem to be cured. I feel that in the silent dark night hours God is talking to me. Not in words and not in instructions or injunctions to DO THIS or DO THAT. I am aware of the presence of God about me,it's like being a part of the beauty of the world that often the day is too busy to feel.

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Read Carl Jung's books, if you haven't already.

I had a dream that was a description of my own mind to myself. I need to pen the images; my wife was in the kitchen too. My subconscious was accessible through a doorway in the courtyard. There were 5 or 6 invisible things in there; one of them put a lantern out for me to know it was there, to help me find it.

I have had a lot of 'corrective' dreams; it is quite pleasing to be healing.

What helps me dream well is physical fatigue; I sleep soundly and long.

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I know a man who has had many strange experiences with dreamworld, which has led me to believe that the options are not quite so cut and dry as either coming from my own mind, coming from God or coming from a demon. The world that consciousness inhabits is much more diverse than the physical one that we see. And some dreams do seem to carry a message from God (aka polycarps martyrdom)

That being said, I would not look to cultivate dreams for their own sake. It is much better to cultivate a soul that meditates on what is good and behaves rightly, which will spill over into the dreams that we have. Just my humble thoughts

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Dreams are partly mediated by fragile EMF within the brain, so shutting down external EMF sources such as cell phones and wi-fi routers is an essential precaution. I have personally noticed that lower EMF interference is associated with more satisfying dreams, whereas sleeping next to a strong source of EMF, such as a fan, is associated with nightmares.

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I would welcome your insights and progress on this subject, I am unfortunately unlike you where I have vivid 4D horrific dreams. My son mentioned to me one day about a good dream he had, I was blown away, I thought everyone had terrifying dreams, I’ve never had a good, happy or humorous dream in my life, I honestly did not know they existed.

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author

Sounds awful - definitely worth trying to change!

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Yes it is, I don’t even know how my mind comes up with things I’ve never seen and don’t exist in real life. I wake so exhausted sometimes remembering every detail, vividly, and in colour like a movie.

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Sep 12·edited Sep 13Liked by Johann Kurtz

"Such dreams could only arise from a life rich in beautiful experience."

On the contrary, I have dreams like that all the time, and my life is as devoid of experience as one can get, certainly of beautiful experience, except vicarious ones.

There are trivial dreams, sure. But I don't remember those. Most of my dreams are infinitely more exciting than my 'real' life and I can't wait to get to sleep. At night I effortlessly cross skies, seas, galaxies, aeons, worlds, universes and multiverses. I dream of epic adventure, great cosmic conflict, wonder, discovery, holy awe, familial affection and loyalty, intrigue, betrayal, desperation, numinosity, grief, danger, horror, companionship, wistfulness, regret, joy, fanaticism, love (though I mostly stopped dreaming about romantic love--or sex--in my early twenties). I am gods, lords, angels, demons, rebels, kings, spies, soldiers, hierophants, explorers, old, young, the opposite sex.

I dream of everything I lack in life. I feel all the emotion I am incapable of feeling 'in the flesh'. Every morning I die when I wake and am resurrected when I shut my eyes and die 'the little death'.

Lately for some reason a certain Mr A. Hitler has been showing up in my dreams under various guises. Last week he was a little kindly old white-haired man in a green garden amid a frozen waste; this week he was my university professor in a packed lecture hall and he made us all link arms and do some kind of Eastern European chaim dance in the middle of the lesson (and the theatre). But I couldn't join in because I was trying to get my shoes on (which for some reason I had taken off).

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author

Was not expecting that last paragraph

(Your dreams sound amazing)

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I wasn't expecting it either!

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“The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

–Sir Walter Scott

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Sep 13Liked by Johann Kurtz

I had a series of dreams for several years after leaving a horrible church. Each dream was located in a house or apartment where I would this beautiful room or space I did not know was there. One i was living in a basement , found a stairway to go upstairs, a discovered I lived in a mansion. When was I lived in an apartment and found a secret hallway to this beautiful room with big windows looking out and beautiful furniture. I clearly heard God say to me get out of the basement and start living in the place I created for you. I had always felt second best maybe third best at church and Christian spaces in those dreams I discovered that God loved me as much as everyone else and wanted me to live in the beautiful place. He created for me, which is the center of his love.

I do believe that our dreams we and her into the supernatural into the non-material part of our lives.

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author

This is very nice, thanks trisha

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Sep 13Liked by Johann Kurtz

I couldn’t stop thinking about this after reading it, so I’m back with some thoughts.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that to have dreams that differ markedly from your day-to-day routine, you need to either have experiences which radically break up that routine, or regularly think about things that exceed what you do every day.

While I’m not a very adventurous person, I do both regularly consume fantasy and science fiction literature, and explore the mystical and spiritual through the lens of Catholicism. Even though I’m not a mystic, nor do I live in a land of fantasy, my mind is continually occupied with both the fantastic and the divine, and thus there is rich material to draw upon when the time comes for my subconscious to produce the dreamscape that I’ll wander each night.

In a disenchanted world, where a person might never come into contact with things that markedly exceed what they do every day, it makes sense that people would not be able to explore different realities through dreams. If nothing you think about escapes the bounds of your waking world, then your dreaming world will also be limited by those same terms.

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author

I share this view entirely

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Sep 13·edited Sep 13Liked by Johann Kurtz

There may be an upside to dreamless nights. My dreams are mostly terrifying lately.

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