Fixing Dreams

Marie Kondo, also known as KonMari, is familiar to many through her bestsellers like 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up'.
Overseas, this KonMari method is incredibly popular,
and in the sense of tidying up,
it has even become a verb like 'to Marie Kondo' or
'Kondoing'.

Speaking of names becoming verbs, I suddenly remembered that I once used to call recording the dreams I saw 'Kiyoaki Matsugae-ing' (only to myself).
He is the protagonist of Yukio Mishima's work 'The Sea of Fertility'.
He kept a very detailed dream diary. So, I called the act of writing down the dreams I remembered by that name.
Conversely, it's a verb that's absolutely hard to use, but it felt like a cryptic word that only I understood, and for a while, I quite liked using it.

I probably have dreams almost every day.
However, there are times when I feel like I had a dream but don't remember it, or I don't even know if I had one at all.
So, I prepared paper and a pen by my bedside so I could write them down as soon as I woke up.
However, it is quite difficult.
I observed and experimented with the battle against dreams around the time of waking for a while, and investigated 'how to write down dreams' in my own way.

The following is 'how it is in my case,' and it is not certain whether it is the same for everyone, but for your reference.

・First, you must not jump up when you wake up.
Even if you were sure you knew, 'Oh, it was this kind of dream,' when you woke up, it easily disappears if you change your posture suddenly.
It feels like a beautiful sand painting drawn on a glass plate, and you accidentally lift the plate vertically and lose it all. ...So,
・If you wake up and remember the dream, ruminate on it in your head over and over without changing your posture.
This is the most important task for fixing a dream.
It's the feeling of sticking a film firmly over the sand painting so it doesn't collapse.
If you do that, the sand painting stays beautiful even if you move the glass plate. ...However,
・If you are touched or spoken to, the sand painting will collapse even if you haven't changed your posture.
Dreams are extremely fragile against external physical stimuli.
Even while you are fixing them, it feels like they are spilling through your fingers as soon as you try to grab them.
In the end, nothing might remain. Oh, the frustration of that.
・Once it is beautifully fixed, gently get up and record it immediately.
Only here can you finally write down the dream.
Here, I just scribble it down like a memo and decide to describe it in detail in a notebook later. ...However, there is a point of caution here.
・Review the memo several times without leaving too much time.
Even though it's a memo I wrote with effort, sometimes when I look back at it to write in my notebook at night, I have no idea what it means. ...That happens occasionally.
I can't remember the dream from the memo. Oh, there is nothing more wasteful than this.
This is because too much time has passed.
…To prevent that,
・Review it again around after breakfast
・If possible, review it again around noon
Although dreams are ultimately images in your head, by ruminating on them again after waking up, the difference becomes like whether the storage medium is 'sand' or a 'videotape'.
It feels like the memory (record?) medium becomes more robust each time you repeat the rumination.
Once that happens, playing it back (in your head) is easy. You can then write it down smoothly in your notebook while watching the playback images in your head.

I believe the above can be trained.
I think I have become much better at fixing dreams than before.

Not 'spilled water will not return to the tray,' but 'sand painting will not return to the glass plate,' so once a dream is lost, you can never remember it again, but
it is a mystery that the images revive when you read the dreams that made it to the notebook.
I wonder how many dreams I have written down so far; it has become quite a large amount.
When that happens, it becomes possible to categorize dreams by type.

……That's all for this time.
Next time, I will talk about the types of dreams and
my future ambitions (?) using those dreams.
I will write the continuation another day, so please look forward to it.