In this extract from his best-selling book Use Your Memory, Tony Buzan shows how you can use your dreams to unleash your creative potential.

Standard ability to remember dreams varies enormously from individual to individual. Some people, in fact, have such bad memories for their dreams that they sincerely believe that they are non-dreamers. This is not the case, for research during the past twenty years has shown that every human being has regular periods throughout the night during which dreaming takes place.

This is evidenced by Rapid Eye Movement, in which the eyelids flicker and flutter, and occasionally the entire body twitches, as the body internally 'sees' and 'moves' with the imaginary story. If you have a cat or a dog, you may have noticed this kind of activity while it sleeps, for most higher mammals also dream.

The first step in the memorisation of your dreams is the actual retrieval of the dream itself. You can accomplish this by 'setting' your mind just before you go to sleep. As you begin to drift off, gently and firmly repeat to yourself 'I will remember my dream. I will remember my dream.' This will 'programme' your brain to give priority when you awake to the recall of your dream. It may take as many as three weeks before you 'catch' your first one, but the process is infallible.

Once you have caught a dream, you enter the second stage of dream memorisation. This is the tricky and 'dangerous' moment, for if you become too excited by the fact you have actually caught one, you will lose it. This is because, for this type of memorisation, your brain needs to remain, for a while, in a non-excited state.

You must learn to maintain an almost meditational calm, gently reviewing the main elements of the dream. You then very gently select two or three of the Key Main Images from the dream, and attach these, using the Memory Principles outlined in Use Your Memory (which are dreamlike in themselves) through one of your basic Peg Systems.

Let's imagine, for example, that you had dreamed that you were an Eskimo stranded on an ice-floe at the North Pole and that you were writing, with gigantic felt-tipped pens, messages for help in the northern sky, forming multicoloured words that looked like the aurora borealis. For this you would need only two items from the Peg System.

Take, for example, the Alphabet System. In this you would imagine that on the ice-floe with you was a gigantic and hairy ape shivering exaggeratedly in the cold with you and thumping his chest to keep warm as an enormous bee buzzed in and out of the multicoloured images you were writing in the sky (see illustration). Note that although the Alphabet System Image Word for the letter A is ace, it is permissible, as here, to use an alternative of your own choice.

Attaching the Major Dream Images to your Major Key Word System Memory Images in this way allows you to easily span the different brain-wave states in which you find yourself when asleep, when waking and when full awake, thus enabling you to remember that important and very useful part of your subconscious life.

Numerous studies completed on people who have started to remember their dreams show that, over a period of months, they become more calm, more motivated, more colourful, more humourous, more imaginative, more creative, and far better able to remember. All of this is not surprising, for our unconscious dream world is a constant playground for the right side of the brain, where all of the Memory Principles are practised to perfection. Getting in touch with these at the conscious level encourages all connected skills to improve automatically.

If, as many people do, you become interested in this area of self-exploration and improvement, it is useful to keep a dream diary in Key Memory Word and Key Memory Image Mind Map form. This diary will give you constant practice in all the skills mentioned and will become an increasingly useful tool in your overall self-development.

After a little practice you may well find yourself both appreciating and creating literature and art at levels you had not previously explored. For example, Edgar Allan Poe first remembered and then used the more nightmarish of his dreams as the basis for his short horror stories, Similarly, Salvador Dali, the surrealist artist, publicly stated that many of his paintings were reproductions of perfectly remembered images from his dreams.

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