I love it when I get a story idea in my dreams, or when I dream a solution to a creative block I’m facing. One of the best short stories I ever wrote (Green_fields published in the now-sadly-defunct White Review) came to me in a dream.

Dreams are such a wonderful creative tool for writers and artists. Not only that, but they can also be deep sources of insight and healing. Yet a lot of people struggle to remember their dreams, or they aren’t even sure if they have dreams.

But even if you think you don’t, everyone does dream, and everyone can learn to remember their dreams. So if you want to have vivid and meaningful dreams at night so they can inspire and support your creative writing, here are my top tips.

Throughout my life, I have cultivated a relationship with my dreams, and that’s the first thing to do: remember that this is a relationship. To have a healthy relationship with anything or anybody, it can’t be one-sided or demanding. So don’t go to bed needing a dream, or expecting to have incredible dreams without nurturing that relationship.

So the first thing to do is cultivate a relationship to your dreams, and the second thing is to cultivate a relationship to your imagination, especially your visual imagination.

You can prime this part of your consciousness by regularly doing guided visualisations. You can find plenty of these online, or you can even just let yourself mindfully drift into daydream, paying close attention to what you see and sense in your mind.

(Also, let me know if you’d like me to share my own guided visualisation for creative writers — I’d be very happy to oblige!)

The third thing is to ASK for dreams. This may sound a bit nuts, but it does work. However, don’t expect it to work right away. It may take you several nights or more before a dream comes to you.

What you do is this: when you’re in bed, just before falling asleep, you’re going to tell your mind that you want a dream. You can also request the type of dream you want: I’d like a dream that lifts my spirits, or that sheds insight on a problem I have, or a dream that gives me a new story idea, etc. Again, this doesn’t usually work on the first try, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

The fourth thing is to get in the habit of writing down your dreams first thing in the morning. A lot of times, our dreams are still there when we first wake up, but they quickly vanish if we don’t pay attention to them. So keep a journal next to your bed, and when you wake up, before you do anything else, write down whatever you can remember, even if it’s just a vague memory like ‘I think I might have had a dream about a bird.’

And if you still can’t remember anything, just write that down in your journal: I don’t remember having any dreams last night, but I hope that tonight I will.

Keep that up, and your dreams will usually start coming to you, and the wonderful thing is the more you cultivate the habit of writing them down, the more frequent and vivid they become.