#50 How to Keep a Dream Journal and Receive Messages from Your Dreams
Kelly shares her method for remembering her dreams and interpreting the messages they contain.
Book mentioned in this episode: Dream Therapy by Dr. Clare Johnson
The High Vibe Journey returns May 8th! Get the full details here.
Read the Transcript for this Episode below:
Episode 50 of the Project Me podcast. Hello and welcome if you're new to the podcast and welcome back if you're a returning listener. It has been a very full month with the launch of my new Soul Explorers membership. Exactly 111 women joined last week from all over the world. I love the number 111. It symbolizes unity.
Connection, oneness, whenever I see the time 1111 or 111 anywhere, all of those ones remind me that we are all one. So having this exact number as the starting point for soul explorers feels very auspicious. But more members are welcome to join. The prerequisite for Soul Explorers is my 4 week High Vibe Journey program and I'm running that again starting May 8th.
I'm going to put a link in the show notes and I'll tell you a little more about that at the end of this episode. Today, I am finally recording the episode about dreams that I've been saying I would do for ages. Last night before bed, I thought, Kelly, when you wake up tomorrow, go through your old dream journals, just pull out some examples.
So I got out the small handful of dream journals that I've got here in Madrid, and I put them on my bedside table with a pack of little sticky notes so I'd finally do it. And guess what? I got up and didn't do it. But then, an hour later, I saw that I had a private Facebook message. I clicked over to it and it was a voice message from Paula, one of my soul explorers.
And she was sharing a dream she'd had about me. She didn't know what it all meant and I thought, Okay. Okay. This is the divine nudge I need not to dive into other parts of my work and just record this podcast. So I'm not going to worry about going through all my dream journals and pulling out the best dreams and all that.
I'm just going to get on with it. So here we go. Episode 50. As a kid, I used to have recurring nightmares. There were two I can still vividly remember now. One was about a dead body stored up in a chest in our attic. I was terrified to go into our attic. The other was about a woman buried alive saying, help me.
Oh, I still get creeps over that one. When I was in my early twenties, I'd have a reoccurring nightmare about a tidal wave heading for me. I'd wake up just as the wave was about to engulf me. And then they stopped. I still have the occasional odd nightmare now, maybe twice a year, where I wake Luca up with my sobbing.
But more often than that, I wake him up with my laughing . I laugh so much in my dreams now, which is wonderful. I think it's a clear reflection of how much happier I am in my life now than ever before. I started writing down my dreams when I was pregnant with my first son, and I carried on for a couple of years.
I didn't know what I'd do with what I'd written down. I just kind of felt compelled to write them down because they were so vivid. There is one entry that stands out amongst all the others. It's dated October 5th, 2000. I wrote, I dreamt Luke and I were walking together in a city with big skyscrapers. It was Then I wrote New York City with a little question mark.
I look up just as a plane is crashing straight into a building. I grab Luca's hand and we run and run. I'd actually drawn a picture of the plane crashing into the building, something I'd never done before or since. This was almost exactly one year before 9 11. I know some people are prophetic dreamers.
Prophetic dreams are dreaming of an experience that is yet to happen in our realm of existence, but later happens. You get a strong sense of déjà vu from having already seen that experience. I watched a documentary once about a guy who would dream about world disasters before they happened, and I'm happy to say that my 9 11 dream is the only one like that I've had.
Well, I did have one in my 20s. I dreamt that the dad on Little House on the Prairie died. I woke up crying and crying. I'd loved that show as a kid, and my whole life growing up, I'd always fantasized that Pa was my dad. Right after that sad dream, the actor who played Pa on Little House on the Prairie, Michael Landon, died of cancer.
And at that same time, my stepdad was diagnosed with cancer and died soon after. But back to my dream journals. Once my second son was born, motherhood properly took over and crazy early starts with little ones meant I no longer had the luxury of waking up naturally and recording my dreams. I gave up my dream journaling practice for nearly 20 years until I started it again in my early fifties.
It was the summer of 2019 when I glanced at an article about dreams and how they can be a gateway into our higher selves and deep intuitive guidance. So that night before bed, I set my intention. Please let me remember my dreams tonight and may they deliver me messages that will guide me in my life.
And that was it. I woke up the next morning and filled pages in my journal with everything I could remember from my dreams. So I set my intention again the following night And it happened again. And again and again. Soon my beautiful and quite pricey journal was filled with messy scribblings of dreams.
So I bought a cheap line notebook and proceeded to fill that up too. One night I dreamt that my favorite business mentor, Marie Forleo, invited me to go to Lake Tahoe with her and a small group of other women. When I woke up from that dream, I felt compelled to go into Marie's private Facebook group for B Schoolers and I asked if there were any dream interpreters out there.
And I got a message from Vicky Evans in New Zealand who said she'd love to offer me a dream analysis session. Sure, why not? What good was writing down all of these dreams if I had no idea what to do with them? Vicky helped me to interpret a long and convoluted dream I'd had the previous night. Rather than analyzing what was literally happening, she got me to pull out major symbols.
Each symbol was then given an identity, and from there, I was able to ask the symbols what messages they had for me. The insights came out as words of sage advice, which felt like they were coming from my higher self. I still use this process from Vicki to interpret my dreams. She'd learned it from Martha Beck, the American life coach.
I'm going to share it with you in this episode because Vicki doesn't seem to be offering this anymore and it really is something anyone can do for themselves. But before I do that, I want to add that I got so much additional dream support from someone who came into my life at that same time in that summer of 2019.
I did an earlier episode on the story of my cat sitter. I manifested this cat sitter. Her name is Catherine Greenfield, a conscious consultant at the time, and how she gave me the nudge I needed to get my high vibe journey program off my Trello board of ideas and into the world. Catherine and I had several conversations about the dream world and learning the linguistics of our dreams.
She called this the language of my spirit and said I'm a very gifted dreamer. She very much encouraged developing my own intimate understanding of the symbols used to communicate in the dream realms. Since that summer, I began accessing a deeper connection to my intuition and I received so much wise advice and guidance from my dream world.
I'm going to share some practical advice that Catherine gave me, as well as what I picked up from a book, and I'm going to blend it all together into what I do now to remember and interpret my dreams. So, start by using a dedicated dream journal. You don't want your dreams mixed in with your to do list notebook or buried amongst your daily missives if you keep a regular journal, so start a separate notebook for recording your dreams.
Again, I use just a cheap one so it doesn't, it gets really messy and I don't really care about it. Keep your dream journal and a pen next to your bed and open up to the next blank page before you go to sleep so you're not fumbling around and potentially losing your dreams in the morning. Set your intention.
As you lay your head on the pillow before you go to sleep, Set a clear intention. I usually say something like, please help me to receive message in my, in my dreams tonight. May I remember them? May I understand their meanings? Or simply, I am open to receiving messages in my dream tonight. It doesn't really matter how you say it.
It's just about you just before you're about to go to sleep, setting that deep intention. You can also use your dream journal before you turn off the lights and you could write your intention and then leave it open, ready to receive. In the beginning, your intention may simply be to recall your dreams as you wake.
If you're the kind of person who just doesn't really remember your dreams or you just have little snippets of it, then just have your, have your intention be that simple. Please, may I remember my dreams when I wake? And then as you have success with this, you can begin to deepen your intentions and include asking for guidance or answers on something important to you.
Then, as you're first waking up in the morning, keep your body still. Try not to move your body for the first few minutes as you gently scan from memories. Feel into emotions and images. If I can recall snippets of several dreams, I give each dream a quick title, so I'm far more likely to remember them when I begin to write.
Like moving escalators dream or French fries dream or sweeping up messes. That's a recurring one for me lately. And that way, when you're thinking of your dreams and then suddenly you have a, like a little snippet of another one that comes in, you can just quickly name the other one, just give it a name.
Has said. Something to do with something in it and then just move on to the next one and just let your mind drift to all these different dreams and kind of do that process first and then gently sit up and begin to write. Don't try to analyze in your head the magic happens when you put pen to paper.
Write down the title if you had one or just whatever you can remember more always flows forth for me once I begin Writing if you remember more than one dream, just keep writing Don't don't worry if you're putting them not in chronological order if it's not really making sense Just keep writing down things that you remember.
You don't have to write it like a story It doesn't need to make any sense. What you're going to be looking for later is any symbols So when you're done and you kind of feel like you've run out of whatever it was, just go back and begin to underline any symbols. Now I think of it as like nouns. So a person, place, or thing.
And I take them one at a time and I move them over to a fresh page. So I'll write down the noun, the object, the symbol, whatever it is. And then kind of like a mind map, I make three little dashes next to it and I write three adjectives, three descriptions of it. I'm going to give you an example from a very recent dream I had last week.
Okay, so I wrote, a giant Bentley pulls up in Ibiza and parks. What an OTT car to drive here. It will get scratched. That kind of car can't get up and down these bumpy roads. I start maneuvering my Land Rover 4x4 around it and I take us up a steep bank to demonstrate that this is the kind of vehicle you drive on roads like this.
So, my first symbol from that dream is a Bentley. Three words to describe it? Well, I made little dashes next to Bentley and I wrote, too fancy, too big, too luxurious, not practical. And then I say, too fancy, too big, too luxurious, not practical Bentley, what message do you have for me? And my pen automatically wrote, make Soul Explorers practical.
Not just something that looks beautiful. People need to navigate through it and get around easily. Be the dependable Land Rover that gets them up steep hills. Help make their journey smoother over all kinds of terrains. And I wrote, thank you. I always write, I always thank my dreams for their wise messages.
And I'd had another dream that night, and that was about the grand opening of a restaurant, and someone bringing in three babies that look like triplets, but on closer look were all different ages. For that one I simply found my pen writing, These babies are your babies over the years. The birth of Project Me, the birth of Project We, and now the birth of Soul Explorers.
That restaurant represents the Soul Explorers opening next week. It's nearly ready and they are coming to enjoy the buffet. You can keep adding more, but for now, welcome them in warmly. I've been feeling low level anxiety as I always feel when I'm organizing something with high expectations. But right after receiving this guidance from my dream, I felt eager and excited to record the welcome video that I've been putting off doing.
And in that welcome video, I used an analogy of a buffet. Telling them that they can come in and choose what they want to take from the buffet, that it's not going to all be to their taste and that's okay. And that they don't need to stuff themselves at once. They can just take a little bit now and come back later.
So those dreams I had that night gave me very practical business advice, which I took. I stopped trying to make the membership platform look too fancy like that Bentley and I just made them feel warmly welcomed in my video. The anxiety I've been feeling completely lifted. And from that day forward, I was just excited about launching soul explorers.
So there you go again, just underline a word like a noun, a person, place, or thing, give it some objective adjectives to describe it. And then ask whatever it is. Like you put it in the order of the adjectives first. So ask the large, heavy, cumbersome water bottle or the sticky, stinky, annoying dog poo.
Those are some of my recent dreams. Um, just say, you know, what message do you have for me? And then just see what flows out. Another thing to pay attention to is how you're feeling in your dream. When I'm having my ice skater or roller skater dreams, I have these recurrently where I'm swirling around and I'm feeling like hot shit.
I know I'm in a good place. And when I'm having dreams where I'm lost and confused and there's a lot of convolution and I'm feeling trapped, that is something to explore in my dream journal. A few episodes back I described my piano dream. Trying to move this old dusty piano with me to my new house and feeling so frustrated that I couldn't get it out.
And finally leaving it behind that dream instigated action. I decided right there and then to leave Project Me and We behind so I could move forward without lugging it around. It is the dream that encouraged me to start Soul Explorers. I actually wrote Soul Explorer in my dream journal. I'd never thought of that name before.
Anne Prince has made so many appearances in my dreams. And as you'll know from previous episodes, the Mother Mary dreams. Oh my goodness. And the one I had recently with Jesus and God in it. I, you know, certain members of my community also make lots of guest appearances in my dreams. Sarah Williamson gets regular voice messages from me.
I've said to her, listen, if you don't want me to do this, she goes, no, I like hearing your dreams. So I just hit record and I share the dreams that I have about her. And Trina in Texas, the same. Paola, I have dreams with her in it. Sometimes I've gone back to my dream journals and I keep seeing Paola's name there, the one who dreamt about me this morning and Louisa.
Yeah. Several people, my grandmother's come up to, which I love. Once I'd experienced my first lucid dream, I wanted to have more of those. That's where you're consciously aware you're dreaming in your dream. And can control where you go. I have directed myself to fly. I've gone to a beach on a cold winter day and I've just relished in lying in the sand and I've swam under the ocean without needing to breathe.
Super fun and really exhilarating. How I, how I do lucid dreaming or how I try to bring on a lucid dream is by remembering during the day to do reality tests. I knock, I knock on solid surfaces and I say I'm not dreaming because my hand does not go through this. That way, when I realize I'm dreaming and I can put my hand through a hard surface, I say, Oh, I'm dreaming.
This is a dream. And the challenge is then to not get overexcited and pop out of the dream, which happens to me too often. You have to stay calm. Cool and calm because it becomes so in a lucid dream. It's hard to describe if you've never had one before, but everything becomes super intense, like in a really amazing way, it feels like you're just alive in a way that you're not really alive in your real life.
It's hard. It's really hard to describe, but when you, when that sensation happens and it's just so like amazing. You can get really overexcited and you go, Oh my gosh, I'm having a lucid dream. I'm, I'm, I'm awake in my dream. And the key is to stay cool and calm. Not always easy. I've had some great astral projections too.
I have a playlist in the insight timer meditation app called lucid dreaming and astral projections, which give guidance for how to have more of these. Um, and these happen more often for me. If I wake up too early in the morning and I just want to try to get an extra hour of sleep in, I will press play.
Play on one of these lucid dreaming or astral projections, because that's the, the sleep state you need to be in is that kind of, you go through different sleep cycles. You can read more about this, but, um, and there's a book I'm going to recommend, um, but it, it, if you are. In certain stages of your sleep, you're far more likely to be able to have a lucid dream or an astral projection.
So I have a book and it's by the same publisher as my book and it's called Dream Therapy by Dr. Claire Johnston, and she's got lots of great prompts and methods Incubating dreams and for understanding dreams and lucid dreams. I'll make sure I put a link to her in the show notes of this episode. And I just picked up the book again this morning, and I'm seeing that the final chapter I haven't yet reached.
Cause I'm, I kind of play around with different techniques and I haven't even gotten to the final chapter. It's called the sixth. Step program to having soul dreams. So I'm going to take a closer look at that tonight. And there's another chapter I haven't gotten to yet called how to incubate a sexual dream.
I think that one needs looking at too. I have another book that I've had for many years, which is like a dream dictionary of meanings. Uh, did you know that dreaming about eating an apple means disappointment is to be expected? Bit of an Adam and Eve reference there, I believe, and dreaming of riding a horse.
symbolizes personal energy and control and a rhinoceros is a sex symbol. Who knew? I'd be really curious though to see if you looked at different dream dictionaries if they'd all say something different. I really don't use this book. I prefer to create my own dream dictionary based on my own interpretations given to me by my higher self.
I will add that as your dreams come forth more consistently, you may find that you don't have time to write down every minute detail and then go back through it all and pull out the, the, the nouns and look for their hidden messages, you know, write the adjectives. I mean, it can be quite a process.
There's some mornings I'm like, I just need to get on with my day. I just don't have time for this. So focus more on the parts that feel the most significant. As well as the strongest emotions you've felt in your dreams, fear, shame, freedom, accomplishment. Do these reflect how you're feeling about anything in your life?
It's become really good journal prompts. You can begin to discern which pieces of information matter to you. So you're not exploring every single symbol in each dream. And you know, if you don't have time to stay in bed, I just don't have time to stay in bed and analyze all my dreams. Sometimes I do. Um, but really you can just write things down.
Like the main thing is like, Even if you think, Oh my gosh, I'm not going to have time this morning to analyze my dreams. Just write them down because I noticed something when I got into that kind of feeling of, Oh, I'm just don't have time. I'm spending too long in bed in the morning. I'm not writing down my dreams.
I just kind of stopped having them. And then I missed them. So I think that now I'm back in the rhythm of, it doesn't matter if I'm not going to give myself a lot of time to write about my dream. If Just write down the dreams and then just close the book. It doesn't matter. And what's interesting about that is sometimes when I've got more time, I can then flip back and I can look and I can see, Oh, there's patterns here.
That dreams come up again. And I wouldn't have even realized that if I hadn't at least written down the dreams. So do write them down. If you're just getting started with this, it's really important that you do this every day, that you set that dream journal out with the pen before you go to bed and you tell yourself that your dreams are important and you set that intention before you go to bed each night.
And even if you wake up in the morning and you're like, Nope, nothing. Just keep doing it. Dream journal open. I think you just a couple of, Random things that aren't even worth analyzing because you can't even make sense of them. Just write them down. The more you are telling yourself that your dreams are important, the more you are going to start remembering them and the more information you're going to access.
So be patient. If the dreams don't seem to come to you or if you lose them upon waking, don't put too much pressure on yourself. Hold a gentle faith that they will come and just keep continuing to set your intention before you go to bed with love in your heart. I am at a time now with my dream journey that I am asking for divine downloads in my dreams.
And may I remember them when I wake up. And some of these are absolutely incredible. So I'm going to end with this one that I just found this morning when I was flipping through. I had the page dog eared. I'm like, why is this page dog eared? So as I began writing down this dream, a whole stream of consciousness poured onto the page.
I'm going to read it to you. I wrote so many dreams sitting on on some steps with Natalie Mobs. Natalie Mobs is another of my Soul Explorer members who is also experiencing incredible messages in her dreams. Um, okay. Sitting on the steps with Natalie Mobs, I find myself sharing very deep and profound wisdom that pours forth from me.
Even as I'm saying it, I'm excited by what's coming out of my mouth as it feels like deep truth. We have never before in history Ben of such a high frequency consciousness. There were always certain individuals at these levels, but it was difficult for others to comprehend. Because their own levels were based on survival and not on conscious evolution.
The church then took these highest levels of truth and expansion and constricted them for centuries. It is only now with so many people free of these constrictions and binds that collective higher levels of consciousness are finally coming through. Now that these freer, sovereign, collective higher frequencies are gathering momentum, Great shifts are happening.
Humans are finally capable of lifting the vibrations of the planet out of the low energies of fear, conflict, oppression, poverty, and into cooperation, expansiveness, positive expectation, belief, and ultimately, the highest expressions of love. In the 70s, there was a great collective opening The dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Yet because the mainstream labeled them all as hippies, it didn't make quite the impact it was capable of. But the children of those freer spirits are here now. Instead of wearing beads and flowers in their hair, they blend in, and their energies are mixed into society, where they are lifting the frequencies of normal schools, offices, etc.
Yoga is now mainstream, as is meditation and ever increasingly other woo woo modalities and practices and tools such as crystals, sound healing, Reiki and breath work. And the children of these people are and will grow up with these tools and create so many more until a shift occurs. where it is more mainstream to be living in higher levels of consciousness than to not be.
These collective energies will naturally pull people together to manifest solutions to the world's problems, elevating the frequencies of the planet to expand into a pure love state. And as I finished telling Natalie all of this, I thought, wow, I hope I'll remember all of this to share at my retreat.
And this dream is dated February 7th, 2022. And I did have my Ibiza retreat two months later and I did completely forget to share this. Dog eared the page and everything and then just got on with my life and forgot about it. But what's amazing about rediscovering this entry right now is that I hear words in all of this that I did share in a recent podcast episode.
If you, if any of that sounded familiar to you, I'm trying to think of which episode it was, but I think it was the one about me saying farewell to saying the word woo woo. So clearly it's sunk in on a deeper level. Because I said so much of that in a recent podcast episode, and it really is how I'm feeling so much about life now in the just year and a bit, since I had that dream, it feels like this is the truth.
And the more I'm leaning into that, the more I'm hearing it from other places too. I mean, I'm hearing this from so many other places as well. So clearly there is a collective truth that is, that is, um, Out there right now, keep dreaming everyone.
Thanks for listening to the project me podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review so it reaches more people. If you'd like to become a soul explorer with me and other curious, open minded women, start with my High Vibe Journey program. In just four short weeks, you'll see life through a fresh new lens.
This program teaches you how to let go of controlling outcomes, how to live in the present moment, get out of your busy mind and live with more ease and flow in your everyday life. From there, magic opens up for you as you live your life from this new perspective. I'll be your guide on this journey, opening you up to new ways of doing and being.
One woman said afterwards that it was like she'd been living with her dimmer switch on low. After four weeks, she felt turned up to full brightness again. Go to myprojectme. com for lots of testimonials and stories from other women who've done the High Vibe journey before you. I hope to see you in this May round of the High Vibe journey.
And if you've been on the High Vibe journey, you are warmly welcomed into Soul Explorers. Our theme for April is going to be awareness and acceptance. Until next time, open your mind, open your heart and stay curious. We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.