Dream Snapshots
Dream Snapshots
by Tracy Marshall
Before you go to sleep, tell yourself that you will mentally take a dream snapshot of the most significant dream of the night. Tell yourself that you will even be aware of doing this while asleep, and imagine that you have a camera with you. You mentally take this into the dream state. You will use the camera at the point of your clearest perception, snap your picture, and — mentally again — take it back with you so that it will be the first mental picture that you see when you awaken.
You will, of course, try to snap as good a picture as possible. Varying results can be expected. Some of you will awaken with a dream picture that presents itself immediately. Others may find such a picture suddenly appearing later in the day, in the middle of ordinary activities.
If you perform this exercise often, however, many of you will find yourselves able to use the camera consciously even while sleeping, so that it becomes an element of your dream travels; you will be able to bring more and more pictures back with you.
These will be relatively meaningless, however, if you do not learn how to examine them. They are not to be simply filed away and forgotten. You should write down a description of each scene and what you remember of it, including your feelings both at the time of the dream, and later when you record it. The very effort to take this camera with you makes you more of a conscious explorer, and automatically helps you to expand your own awareness while you are in a dream state.
Seth / Jane Roberts & Robert Butts, The Unknown Reality Vol. II (hardbound edition) p. 445
When I first read Seth’s Dream Snapshot exercise I decided to give it a try. It was during a long period of poor dream recall, which was beginning to be frustrating — I felt like I was missing out on huge vastly entertaining portions of my self.
I suggested before going to sleep that I would take a mental snapshot of a significant part of the dream, one that would remind me of what the dream was about.
And I remembered this: I met my dog Rosie in the dream, who had died the previous year. I said “Rosie! You’re back! I will take a photograph of you to prove that you’re really back, in case nobody believes me” and proceeded to take her photograph with a large black camera.
Dream snapshots don’t always involve the inclusion of an actual camera in the dream, of course — this was an amusingly literal interpretation — but it worked!
Another dream snapshot was about a car with bald tyres. It was stationary in the dream snapshot, but with the accompanying feeling that it was going to be going really fast. Then I had a lucid moment when I said “WAIT! It doesn’t have to have bald tyres OR be going really fast.”
I mentioned the dream to a friend that day who lives on the other side of the globe. At the time of my dream, she had nearly had a car accident in the rain because of her bald tyres. She said that she had been telling herself for ages to replace her bald tyres before the rain. Perhaps this wasn’t so much a dream snapshot in the usual sense, but a telepathic communication, or perhaps even a projection snapshot.
Sometimes I wake up with a phrase. Most of these riddles remain unsolved to this day, for example: ‘Coastal parking on any of the gardens of the self’ and ‘One man went to mow a scattered lettuce’. Undeciphered they may be, but they offer an intriguing glimpse into the dream world in the absence of more detailed dream recall.
Recently I recalled a dream snapshot of my dog, Tom, who died last year. The dream snapshot inspired me to go for a walk to his favourite place, a lagoon. I had been wondering if Tom’s energy had reconfigured into another creature, and wondering what that creature might be. While I was walking by Tom’s lagoon, a white cow caught my attention, and I wondered if perhaps Tom had ‘reincarnated’ as a cow. The next night I recalled another dream snapshot. I was holding a list like a menu, and I was saying “I like Tom Cutlet best”.
