This is the start of a new game development series. I will be showing you basics of working with Unity game engine. Unity is used mainly in game development (games like Inside, Cuphead and Hollow Knight), movie CGI scenes and for animated movies.

Hermes in the unconscious realms Our dreams tell us about things outside of our conscious awareness. That is why they are so useful for therapy and dealing with neurosis. Especially important are dreams while you are becoming your perfect self, the individual you were always supposed to be, but are not quite there yet. There are parts of your personality, hidden in your unconscious mind, you can access only through methods like active imagination or dream analysis. The analytical psychology, created by Carl G. Jung, is heavily dependent on dream analysis. Jung himself spent years analyzing his dreams and visions (and he captured most of them in the Red Book) and even came up with the method of active imagination. Okay, but how do you actually analyze your dreams? If you are like most people you probably don’t remember your dreams. You wake up and have only a fuzzy memory, that vanishes after a few seconds. Not much material for analysis. I have been analyzing my dreams for about 2 years now, and I had whole months where I didn’t miss a single day. And that comes from someone who didn’t pay any attention to his dreams and was always forgetting them immediately. That was before I was aware of their significance. Here I will share my methods for creating the perfect conditions for your dreams to be strong and to emerge every night, methods for capturing them and the basics of dream analysis.

[ Creating the perfect conditions for the dream ]

If you follow some basic rules it is almost guaranteed you will dream every day and remember it too. First is regular sleep. It helps tremendously to have a routine and be able to wake up at the same time every day. Clean living. You need to keep the mind clean. I found, in my years of dream analysis, that when I use any substances, the dreams will not be strong enough to get close to the barrier of consciousness. If I use too much coffee — no dreams. If I smoke or take snus — no dreams. What helped a lot was an active lifestyle. This February and March I had dreams every other day, because I was doing jiu jitsu twice a week. Since the corona started, and I’ve been staying at home, in isolation, not moving much, the dreams ceased to happen that often. Then there are herbs you can take to make your brain blood circulation better. The most useful herb I know for this is Withania Somnifera, ayurvedic Ashwagandha. Its name literally means “dream-giving”. For the perfect room conditions: sleep in a room that is pitch black. Don’t use any blue light screens 2 hours before bed. Lock your room to minimize any fear of outside interference. Feel completely safe and alone. Use ear plugs if you are sensitive to noise. You can borrow some mental techniques from the lucid dreamers. Most people are only able to dream the dream, let it happen to them. Not lucid dreamers. They became so skilled in dreaming, through extensive training, that they are able to communicate with the unconscious entities in their dreams and even create the dream as they see fit. One of the basic techniques they use is this: setting intentions. Before you fall asleep, tell yourself what you want to dream about, what problem or life situation you need help with and also tell yourself that you will dream tonight.

[ Capturing the dream ]

How often did you wake up from a dream in the middle of the night, then went back to sleep and when you woke up with your alarm clock, you had no idea what you dreamt about? That happens to everyone, even experienced dreamers. What you need to do to capture the dream is very simple. Pen and paper. Place it next to your bed, on your nightstand, under your pillow, wherever. The point is that when you wake up in the middle of the night, and the message from the unconscious realm is still floating near the surface, above the consciousness barrier, and you can scribble about it on the paper. Doesn’t matter it will be hard to read, you are familiar with your writing and you will be able to read it a few hours later when you wake up again. I’ve used this method successfully and it works. Sometimes, when I have a phone nearby I write a Google Keep note. Voice recordings work only for really strong dreams (writing is better for weaker dreams, because you remember other parts of the dream as you write. Doesn’t happen with voice recordings). When there is no phone or paper, I will just grab Kindle Paperwhite and type a note on the touchscreen. If you set up your environment like this, you will be able to capture the dreams every day. The hardest obstacle is of course finding the willpower to write about the dream when you wake up at 3 AM and you can barely open your eyes, let alone hold a pen and write and don’t want to burn your eyes with the phone backlight. When you do find the willpower tho, you will more often than not find a deep meaning in the dream. I have created a tool that will help you keep your dream notes structured. I was curious if I could see any patterns in my life that I wasn’t aware of, and I also needed a tool to track my dreams, my mood, music, habits, daily journals and so on, so I created TaoTime:

TaoTime is a dream tracking software with extra features. Its development took me over a year and I developed it so I…

jilecek.itch.io

[ Analyzing the dream ]

So now you have written about your dream and it sounds like a bunch of nonsense that will not help you in any way? Realize that dreams are full of symbols, concepts and deep meaning that may not be obvious at first.

Dreams are always connected to your psychological state and your current life circumstances.

You can either love or hate the horror genre, depending on your “need for affect”. In the first case you tend to have extreme attitudes across a variety of issues, choose to view emotional movies or become involved in emotion-inducing events. In other words, you accept negative emotions as a part of life. In the second case you try to avoid these emotions if possible. That group of people will never develop into their best selves, because they refuse to see their shadow side and refuse to walk through the mud of their minds to get to the true meaning of their lives.

Not all those who wander are lost. — J.R.R. Tolkien