“Last night I dreamed I ate a ten-pound marshmallow and when I woke up the pillow was gone.” Tommy Cooper

Most of the benefits you could get from dreams, slip through your fingers like sand if you don’t record them.
Here are 4 reasons why you should record them.

• Because otherwise you will forget them. Dream researchers say we forget 90-95% of our dreams.

• In order to learn to interpret dreams.  The only way to truly learn to interpret dreams, or verify whether a given interpretation was accurate or not, is to record them, and have some way to come back to them over time and work with them.

• Two dreams saved millions of lives from a seven year famine when Pharaoh’s dream was interpreted by Joseph. You never know how important a dream could be for you, your family or even your country.

• You’ll spend a third of your life sleeping. Why not get everything you can out of it? :)

 

Here are 5 tools that I have found to be absolutely essential when it comes to actually doing something with your dreams.  

 

Get ’em free for a limited time.  If you share them with a friend before midnight, you get a free pack of smokes.

 

THE TOOLS:

1.  Write them down now. Not later.

I see the caboose of the train off in the distance, getting smaller and smaller.

It’s the train I was late for.

Dreams don’t offer much grace for tardiness most of the time.  They just leave with out you.

And they’re rather elusive when you try to remember them later.

If you’re anything like me, then you really have to write them down as soon as you wake up.

I’ve lost count of the amount of dreams I intended to write down, confident that surely I couldn’t forget “such a vivid dream”, but sure enough, later I would realize I just couldn’t remember the dream no matter how hard I tried.

 

2.    Don’t be selective about which ones you write down.

Write down the good, the bad and the ugly.

God speaks through good and bad dreams, so don’t be afraid to write down even the bad dreams you wish you could get out of your head.

The more I learn about dream interpretation, the more convinced I am that all dreams are worth being recorded, because until you know the meaning of the dream, you can’t really objectively evaluate how important the dream is.

 

3.    Tool #3 requires a tool.  Use a geek tool to organize them.  

I’m a big Evernote user.  I love notebooks, but I frankly lose them, over time, so they really don’t work well for me in the long run.

To be precise, I use TAGS to organize recorded dreams in Evernote.  When I write down a dream, I tag it with one of the “dream” tags I have created (you can create your own tags, and name them however you want).

I have a general “dreams” tag I use, and then a few other tags I can choose also like “ukraine dreams” and “tanya’s dreams” is a tag I use for dreams my wife had that I want to keep track of, and compare with others that I had.

The cool thing about tags as opposed to the more typical way of organizing information in folders is that one recorded dream can have multiple tags.  Whereas, you can’t keep one file in multiple folders.  You have to choose.

For example I could record a dream that Tanya had about Ukraine, and tag it with “ukraine dreams” and “tanya’s dreams”.

That way, at any given moment I could easily access all the dreams I have about Ukraine, by clicking on the “ukraine dreams” tag, which would open all notes with that tag, but I would also see the dreams that Tanya had about Ukraine, whereas if her dreams were all in a separate folder, that wouldn’t work.

I would be searching within the “ukraine dreams” folder, and miss a dream that was in the Tanya folder, that actually had references to Ukraine also.

I love the way tags work.  They’re not actually as geeky as they sound.

It’s kind of confusing at first, but it’s a really great way to organize important information, once you get a hang of it.

I highly recommend getting a hang of Evernote. Evernote Essentials really helped me get on track using it.

Here’s one post I wrote about Evernote, if you’re interested in learning more: One App that saved me from a disorganized life of clutter

Or best of all, check out this book that really helped me learn to use Evernote.  This is the best way to really get all the juice out of Evernote.  Click on the button bellow to check it out. Highly recommend it.

Evernote Essentials – by Brett Kelley

 

4.  Extract and condense.

This is a nifty trick I wrote about in a blog post called A simple hack for effectively stewarding prophetic words.  But it can be applied to dreams.  Easily.

Obviously you can’t re-read, and study your dreams every day.

Who has time for that?

But here’s something that is doable.

You can extract one or several important elements from a a dream and compile them.

For example you could re-phrase or simply copy the main theme of the dream in a concise condensed way and include it in a compilation of prophesies or declarations you can use in your devotions.

Or you could count how many times God showed you a particular thing in dreams you’ve had, to help you discover a thread weaved throughout your dreams/prophecies that speaks of your life calling or gifting.

I’m in the process of doing that with all my dreams and all the prophecies I’ve received over the years.

I’m compiling a list of “calling” related elements from prophecies and dreams, that I will break down into percentage ratios that will help me see what God has spoken to/about me the most.

 

5.    Share.  It’s not always easy to find someone who genuinely wants to hear your dream, however it can be very helpful.   

Dreams are kind of like thoughts.

Thoughts untangle themselves running over lips and pencil tips. Source unknown.

I think there’s more power to dreams when we share them.

It can feel awkward or intimidating to share something God showed about you in a dream, but it’s powerful.

Just the process of revealing something kind of intimate like that has power in it, and it makes me believe it more.

Plus you might get an interpretation you never ever would have thought of.

That’s happened to me a few times.

“It’s strange how interesting your dreams are, but when someone tries to tell you their dream you’re just like ‘WHATEVER!'” Comedian Jim Gaffigan

 

Hopefully I’ve inspired you to be more diligent about writing down your dreams and doing your best in stewarding them and moving toward interpreting them.

I actually very much enjoy interpreting dreams, so feel free to share one, if you want to risk me taking a shot at interpreting it for you.  Comment below or email me at john @ thejohnlynch . com

 

Image courtesy of a joint venture with my kids.  No Photoshop involved in image.  Real picture.  Exposure time 15 full seconds.  :)

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