From an interesting LD post on Reddit. Thought it might be useful for some of us.
# Dream mapping
When you are at 20-30 entries in your journal, it’s time to map your dreams.
- grab a big sheet of paper (though i don’t see why can’t you do it in your computer or on your journal, if it’s big enough) ;
- read your first dream, where it was happening (let’s say, your house);
- draw a house somewhere (probably in the middle) very schematically, like a square and a triangle, in my dream balcony was a thing so I added it too:
- next dream, next location, draw it the same way;
- map all of your dreams like that.
It should look like Google maps in the end just more schematic, if locations have reoccurring objects or something that drew you attention or you have interacted with, draw them too (and locations themselves might take more surface area with that).
At first put locations at random, but soon you will feel where places actually belong. Another point, you might have three dreams all in a mall, but in the first it’s in mountains, in the second there.is a nuke silo, and on the third there is a strip-club (and it really caught your attention), then draw it as a mall in the mountains with a nuke silo and a strip-club.
Sometimes dreams occur at completely different locations, like space or other planets or some underground. Put them.on the same map anyway, just a bit to the side. The map doesnt have to actually make sense .
Here is an example of an someone’s first map: click. Sorry that it’s in Russian, but you see that it doesn’t require some amasing drawing skills. That’s what you can have after your first month, later as the numbers of dreams and how many details you recall increases, you will have to ditch the first map and draw a bigger map anyway, so you can work on how pretty it is later. Here how your maps eventually might look like (this isn’t an actual map): click.
Alright. You will notice that out of your 30 dreams most of them happen in recurring locations. And as you put it on paper, you may SUDDENLY (for real) get a memory of a dream that happened in that location. You might be drawing the map and then feel, that the mall has to be here, next to the park! And between the park and the mall you had another dream! Something like that. Obviously, not very fast at first, but with 30 dreams in the journal you can already recall a few more.
“Very amusing, but what’s the point?”, you will ask. Obviously, it’s fun and it gets you to interact with your dream.memory. But at some point you will recall all dreams ever , you really get in touch with your dream life this way. Just throwing a glance at the map makes all the memories arise instantly. If in the morning you barely remember your dream, the map helps with that too.
Think about it like an analogy of a photograph. Let’s say, you had a vacation as a ten year old in some interesting place. You don’t remember a thing. But when you look at one picture, it brings a memory back, and that memory brings another one… You get the idea.
Drawing maps and looking at them trains you to use your dream memory, which is not used at all normally. The more “pictures” you have there, the more dreams you recall it perfect quality. In principle it is the same as dream journal, except out brain perceives images much faster then text, and they are closer to our subconscious. Besides, when you get to 100 entries on the journal, rereading everything is just not practical. The map, on the other hand, takes just a glance.
Eventually you get to the point when you can remember everything just by looking at the map, and the memories crash like a wave in the barrier that separates waking memory and dreams. Without that separation dreams will be remembered just like RL, and lucidity will come much easier. This is an important step in lucid dreaming and this is what you should be working towards after you are confident with becoming lucid.
