The Meaning of Dreams
Why are Dreams so important for our Yoga?
Inner growth is not being achieved through complying with laws or just by acting "good" and "pure" towards the outside world. Mainly, the inner human being has to be developed which means that the personality of the human has to grow strong and has to be brought to harmony. The requirement for a right inner development is a control factor. These control factors are our dreams. Dreams do not lie to us but always speak the truth. Sometimes they seem merciless but in an honest way.
Why aren't we remember them occasionally?
Sadly, it happens that we cannot remember our dreams. This has an explainable reason: The impressions of the dreams are stored in the short-term memory. The human being has two main memory storages – the short-term and the long-term memory. Most environmental impressions are not worth being consciously remembered forever. This would be a huge amount of work and we would fail to differentiate between important and unimportant things. An impression that is dealt with at least 5 minutes becomes stored in the long-term memory. This much time it takes to stay awake and to deal with the dream's content to remember it properly.
An alarm clock causes a shock. If one gets up immediately after waking up, thinking about the next steps for the coming day, one will definitely lose the memory of the dream. When we wake up at night it helps to characterize the dreams we had with a few keywords and then we go back to sleep. Ideally, one can note down these keywords on a piece of paper.
© Alfred Ballabene (Vienna) translated by Seth