A Week of Journaling My Dreams
Written by Alexa LoSchiavo. Graphic by Avery Melhado.
What is the power of dreams? And how can you use dreams to understand yourself?
These were the questions that circled my mind as I headed into my new assignment by District. To dream journal for an entire week. It felt like a nerve wracking concept until I realized that most of us who are students at SCAD are living inside of our dreams, consciously working to create our realities. There couldn’t be a better place to share dreams than a college where everyone is working to follow theirs.
Awake or sleeping dreams seem to transport you to a world of wishes, a world where power falls into your hands and you are the sole proprietor of your destiny. To carefully analyze and describe those dreams may end up telling you more than you want to know. But as artists, sometimes our best inspirations come from dreams, when the thin veil between sleeping and waking is dropped and we see ourselves as entities that can do almost anything. As artists, sometimes we have the responsibility to delve into our subconscious.
Dreaming is integral to being an artist. Thinking and creating demands some sort of dream-like state, the power to take ourselves out of the context of our own skin. To delve into someone else’s life. To delve into metaphors. To delve into color. And when we analyze our dreams we can find that the art we immerse ourselves in ties quite beautifully into our dream worlds, perhaps even more than we realize.
I spent the last two weeks chronicling my dreams. Writing down snippets or sharp images that seemed to pop up into my mind. If I was lucky, I’d get to write out the whole dream, beginning, middle and end, in a blurry, half-true way, all I could remember in a half-asleep state. I found that much of my dreams seemed to worm their way into my creativity, but in a way that I didn’t think about before.
Much of my dreams were centered around anxieties I had, which is a common practice for dream states. They’d go from nerves at getting a B to nerves at falling off a bridge, and the comparisons would seem to go hand in hand loosely. My worry about getting a B was tied to my fear of not being able to control my situation. Some of my dreams ended up being stories about people I’d seen briefly in passing. Others were merely remembered as sharp images and colors that wormed their way into my mind.
While my dreams themselves didn’t make a lot of sense, I think the act of dream journaling helped me prescribe sense to my mind and where a big part of my creativity comes from. I found that a lot of the things I was nervous about worked their way into my writing and the anxieties of living a life seemed to be the first things I grasped at in my writing process.
Writing down each of my dreams helped me realize that a lot of my creativity comes from everyday worry or stress and the attempt to make that beautiful and find joy in the worry that we as humans prescribe to things.
The act of dream journaling isn’t a perfect art, as dreams are hard to delve into fully, but I think that dream journaling can help someone express what can’t be said and further delve into what makes them creative or what is lurking under the surface. This practice of dream journaling is something I’ve been in and out of my whole life, and each time, I think that it helps me understand that creativity comes from unexpected places within. You have everything you need to make something, to create a masterpiece, to create something bad— it all lies within you. I think dream journaling allows one to notice that you hold all the tools for creativity inside of yourself, and whatever’s lurking inside can be expressed, found beautiful and made into something that has meaning to more than just you.
Alexa is a sophomore majoring in Writing and hopes to pursue a career in publishing and writing books. Outside of writing for District, she can be found writing about almost anything, reading in the park, or taking pictures of beautiful things.
