Why I Record My Dreams by Nori Muster As a teenager I sometimes kept a journal and recorded dreams. In my twenties I joined ISKCON, a Hindu-based fundamentalist religious group. They did not allow devotees to record a dream unless it was about God. For people who don't remember dreams, that's no problem. But people like me who remember dreams feel a need to write them down and try to understand them. I can't speak for others, but my need to know comes from the dreams themselves. At times they are saturated with compelling feelings that make me want to understand them. The most demanding dreams I ever had were in ISKCON, when I would dream about my old friends. ISKCON leadership told us we had to abandon our former lives completely, including our friends. After I married into ISKCON in 1985, my dreams about friends became nightmares. I believe the nightmares mirrored my anxiety because of being forced to cut off my friends. I would wake from these dreams feeling lonely and scared. I talked this over with the head of our department and he agreed, recording my dreams might help. Ever since then I have recorded all the dreams I remember. I digitized (typed) my journals to collect statistics. As of this writing, December 2024, I have 13,607 dream records.