I take great pains to be accurate when I record a dream because I have learned that the details in dreams are equal to the action and setting. When I tell folks I work with to "jot" down everything they can recall, I don't mean to skim over details, such as, that the taxi driver was wearing a green hat or the road you crossed had a crosswalk. Whatever you remember, jot it down. By "jot", I mean don't fuss with the wording, just get it down, but don't leave things out.
What happens in a dream is as real as we are willing to let it be. If we have an unpleasant dream, we may forget the whole thing, or wake with the vague awareness that we had an unpleasant dream, but vague awarenesses are often our loss. Granted, we might be afraid of what the dream is saying, but it's just as likely that we are babying ourselves, or protecting ourselves from some insight that would compensate for a one-sided approach to how we are conducting our lives!
In fact, forgetting and dismissing dreams, as if they aren't important, is not normal behavior for us, as a species. We are, if you factor in the whole evolution of human consciousness, a dreaming species. Dreams are stories that our psyche is inviting us to experience so that we can get through something or even finish the puzzle of a stage of life! (When we have nightmares, it is, not always, but often, because we are paying for ignoring our dream-life and letting things build up like a pressure cooker.)
When unrecalled dreams stack up we experience a ill-defined anxiety, because we are walking around like a human pressure-cooker, but also a human projection-house, because repressed dreams do not simply disappear back into the unconscious. Dreams are not made of nothing! They are spun from archetypes and complexes that represent a certain amount of life-energy (Jung called it psychic energy or libido). Dreams have a life of their own (!) that has to be respected. Jotting them down is our way of respecting them. If we don't respect our dreams, they project into our lives, so it is as if, rather than living our lives spontaneously and creatively, we are performing in front of a blue screen all the time, where all of our complexes are projected. That is not a good situation. In fact it is exhausting! But that is a pretty fair description of how most people in the Western World are functioning, by ignoring or dismissing our dream life.
I will just site one example (of which there are many) of how a dream changed the direction of my life for the better. I had a dream where I was attacked, as if out of nowhere, by a jackal. I was working with a dream-analyst at the time and we both agreed that that dream was a wake-up call. I took that dream extremely seriously as a warning that something life-threatening was attacking me from within. As a result, I wound up heading for the Peruvian rainforest to work with ayahuasca. In a nutshell, because of that dream, and the actions I took because of that dream, events began to cascade toward healing and getting my life back on track. So please, don't sideline your dreams!
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