Keeping an extensive dream journal on a computer for the last three years has proven to offer insights hardly expected from such a medium. As an example, one morning after writing a dream down, I tried to save the file onto the hard drive, using the date of the dream, 1-24, as the file name. I had previously saved all my dream entries using the date of the dream as the file name. My computer beeped a warning and the following message came up: Replace existing 1-24? I canceled the save command for I didn't want to wipe out the existing file. Curious, I double clicked on the file's icon. I discovered that I had written a dream down exactly one year before, using the same date (month and day without the year) as the file name of the dream entry I was trying to save at the moment. Once the file opened, I found that the year old dream was so similar to the one I just had written down, that it prompted me to investigate further into these peculiar cybersynchronicities.
The dream I had on 1-24-98 was of two calves emerging out of a barn to snuggle up to me. After their expression of such charming bovine affection, they then swam off in tandem across a lake. I then read the dream I had written on 1-24-97. I discovered that I had a dream in which a bear ambled out of a cave, came up, snuggled me and then rested its head on my lap, after expressing such charming arkturial affection!
Many chronological dream synchronicities have been uncovered with the method of opening up the Find File program and searching for dreams written, one, two, three years ago. If you have kept dream journals on your computer, I suggest becoming familiar with the Find File command on your PC. Use the month and day as the file name for your dream entries without the year. This will enable you to swiftly search through your dreams and see if there are any annual matches. The Find File technique is useful for those who are aware of reoccurring dreams but want to find if there is any underlying pattern to the reoccurrences.
Depending on how long you have kept your dreams on your computer, this mode of inquiry affords instant access in a way that paper bound journals cannot. The immediacy of the data's appearance on the computer monitor's screen affords a view of dreams that cannot be had by merely thumbing back through the tattered pages of a dream journal scrawled with nearly incoherent, pre coffee writing and searching for recognizable patterns of reoccurrence. Using the Find File command, I have discovered that not only the people and animals in the dreams themselves reoccur, but plots, outcomes, environments, atmospheres and even feeling tones as well.
The synchronicities have led me to believe that dreams are not purely acausal or random as they have been described to be by some of the founding forepeople of psychotherapy. Perhaps when one looks at an individual dream and its lack of continuity and at times coherency, that may seem to be the case. But when one pulls back, opens the camera lens wide and looks at the larger composition of dream cycles, a recognizable pattern pattern/paradigm can indeed be discerned. Then, with an expanded perspective, the patterns become meaningful. Computer dream journals can help promote this kind of enhanced, chronological appreciation of dreams, adding a new dimension to interpretation and understanding. Our electronic dream journals can become, after a few years, a Farmer's Almanac of the unconscious. We can access such an almanac when we want to plant, cultivate and harvest our dreams according to the waxing and waning of our inner moon.
The discoveries of such timely reoccurrences in dream patterns via the computer has inspired me to regard such dream cycles as being universal in nature. Within our personal dreams lie some important clues to the larger and broader cycles, meta-patterns of reoccurrence over vast distances of time, from the Nimesha (eye blink) of the Big Bang birth to the final minutes of the Day of Brahmin which consists of 4,320,000,000 years. (Imagine a dream journal kept for that many years! Imagine the galactic synchronicities one could discover!) Appreciating the cycles of the universe's dream, enables us to expand our awareness to these vast cosmological levels. We can then regard our dreams as being a part of such extensive cycles much more expansive than we normally do. We can appreciate that our dreams actually influence these larger cycles.
With practice, using the Find File mode of investigation, whether on our physical computers or through active imagination, we may be able to pinpoint a decade, a year, perhaps even a moment of quality time in the Precambrian era. We may be able to hone in on a morphogenetic field of a Trilobite and see what it was dreaming way back when and see if it in any way corresponds to what we dreamt about last night or last year.
