Why i can't have dreams?

I am reading Man and His Symbols by Jung, and i would really like to dream more often to understand my subconscious and help myself, because some recent dreams that I had are really significant. The thing is that i dream once every 2 weeks or something like that, although sometimes in the day i feel that i did dream something but i can't quite remember it. Why is that? Do you have any advice?? I really need to do this...

Keep a dream journal by your bed. As soon as you wake up, write into it, even if it's just "I didn't have any dreams tonight". If you can, don't even move around in bed because that wakes you up and you forget your dreams quicker. Stay still and reach for your diary or record an audio note on your phone or whatever. Your dream recall will pick up, and fast.

Daydream, you have to increase your visualisation potential. Drift in art

>>5967 >i feel that i did dream something but i can't quite remember it I think dreams exist primarily as something other than the events and stories they are described as, and the process of remembering them is normally one of translation, into a form that can be manipulated by a conscious state. It is possible to sometimes during the day briefly recall a dream in a vague sense like remembering a smell or an emotion, but lacking anything more substantial you can't index it or easily refer to or describe it, and after a moment you can no longer feel it, and so there is nothing left to hold on to. But even when there is something remaining to hold on to, it does not assure a link back to the source. You may have a list of interconnected events roughly translating what the dream was, but intense and alien sensations and emotions that gave them weight and color are not necessarily possible to recreate just by invoking that story. This is my biggest problem with how dream interpretation tends to work; if you know on a deep level what a dream means while you are having it, and that dream is steeped in your personal conscious experience and unique structure of mind, then how is any standard formula for external interpretation going to have anything real to do with it, being based only on shallow remainders? It seems the most likely outcome will be that what you knew while dreaming will be displaced and covered over by some false explanation more conveniently applicable to conscious life and thought, and further dreams will be increasingly disrupted by expectations and flawed translation efforts. That said, the best dream recall happens if you can start translating immediately after waking up from deeper sleep (as opposed to waking up a little and then dozing without doing much), and gradually re-translate while going through stages of increasing wakefulness. Don't just focus on what happened, try to retain as much of the rest of it as you can.

I spent most of my life not having any dreams. After I starded working, going to college and just generally doing new things and meeting new people i started to dream almost everyday. In my experience it mostly has to do with what you experience in your day-to-day life -the more you live, the more you dream.

>>5979 I think you're onto something. Maybe the maintenance brains do nightly just involves touching/activating a lot of neurons that don't normally fire together which gives a lot of dreams that "random" or synesthesia-like quality. Obviously the dreams that are more ordered or have to do with recent events you've experienced in waking life are different and probably your brain analyzing them specifically, but the unstructured ones might be qualitatively different.

I am OP and i want to thank you all for replying. A year has passed and I am now dreaming at least every day (even countless dreams in a night) and i can tell you what has worked for me: Whenever i dream i write everything i remember in a diary. That is, a paper diary, because i noticed that writing on a phone makes me forget a lot of details, probably because my mind already goes elsewhere. I also try to interpret my dreams. I think this is important because our unconscious has a life just like our conscious and to go forward in our dreams we have to at least acknowledge the symbols and archetypes in our dreams. Lastly i don't do anything active in the night. Meaning i don't actually use that much brainpower and i either watch a movie or play vidya or read books. Last year i was often studying or being here instead, which to be honest gives me a lot to think and my brain just never breathes.

>>6882 thank you for the update OP, I suspect a lot of what you're doing would work well for me so I'm going to try interpreting my own dreams and choosing more passive entertainment in the evening.

>>5967 I am not trying to be offensive but your brain is just weak, you can train it like a muscle (it is a muscle) by reading stuff like fantasy and just imagining things.

>>5967 I was recently recommended this. Great stuff. Didn’t look to deeply into it yet though. Soon.