My friend John just sent me a hilarious and awesome website called the World Dream Bank. I’ve only spent a few minutes looking over it, but it seems to be the work of one guy, Chris Wayan. It features illustrations and detailed written accounts of over 2,000 of his dreams going back many many years. There’s a lot of great observations mixed into it all, like this opening bit on his Nightmare page:

My own dreams suggest that some nightmares (not all) come just to give your glands a workout–an idea first proposed by trance channeler Edgar Cayce back in the 1930s. In these nightmares, the content is essentially artistic, not symbolic–for the content isn’t the point–your panic and outrage is. Nightmares can do for your feelings what hot peppers do for your digestion–stimulate like a tonic. Why shouldn’t emotions (and the hormones that drive them) need a workout just like muscles?

There’s also a really good page on dream recall. I really like this tip:

I suspect our memories of dreams are no weaker than our memories of waking experiences–it’s our indexing that’s weak. After all, we recall by association, and if your dreamlife is unconnected to your waking life, how can you retrieve it? This theory has implications for people who recall no dreams at all. Your dream-contents may be so distant from your waking life (not necessarily threatening, just distant) that there’s simply no associative link; so if attention drifts for a moment, as the dreamer wakes, there’s no way back. This suggests that beginning dreamers who can’t recall a thing should deliberately visualize a lot of random images–better yet, places and people and things you never see. It’s quite a mental challenge on its own–try thinking of the things and thoughts you don’t think! But beyond a mere mental workout, there may be a prize: you may stumble on a link to a dream, and discover you remember your dreams just fine–you just can’t recall them. Your friends are real, you have a phone–you just lost the number. I’ve done this. It takes patience, but it does work.

Very fun stuff. Definitely worth checking out!