Last week I took my three-year-old camping in the mountains for ten days. (Yes, you read that right.)
Somewhere in there I noticed my dreams had changed. They were more vivid. And I was waking with them still intact — not fragments, but whole dreams, easy to reach.
Maybe it was sleeping closer to the moon. I’d like that to be the answer.
But I think it was something much more ordinary.
The morning is the whole thing
My toddler slept in while we were camping. So I woke slowly, to birdsong and sunlight, and then I simply lay there. No phone to reach for. No breakfast to make yet. Nothing asking anything of me.
And my dreams were right there.
I don’t think I was dreaming more. I think I was finally leaving enough room to notice.
Most mornings, the moment we open our eyes we start doing — making breakfast, tending to a toddler, checking the phone before we’ve fully sat up. The part of us that plans and sorts and answers comes online fast, and it crowds out the part that was still dreaming. The dream doesn’t slip away because it wasn’t important. It slips away because nothing made space for it.
Bringing the camping morning home
You don’t need ten days in the mountains for this. You need a few minutes.
When you wake, before you reach for anything, stay where you are. Keep your eyes closed if you can. Don’t chase the dream — chasing tends to scatter it. Just lie still and let it come back to you.
It takes patience. We’re used to quick answers, ChatGPT style: ask, receive. This is a slower pace. The dream returns in pieces, and rarely in order — a color first, then a room, then who was standing in it.
Give it the space and it usually comes.
If you’d like somewhere to put what returns, the Lunar Dream Map is the wheel I use every morning.