272 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
answer after a fashion. It has however struck me that I might 
have given you a more detailed instruction with advantage. 
When I was up the Mindoun Chong in Burma, I started an 
investigation of my dreams; and the only way to catch them 
was to write down as much as I could remember on waking, 
instantly. The result of doing this is rather surprising. To 
begin with, I discovered, especially as the practice progressed, 
that I was having many more dreams than I had previously 
supposed . This might have come about in either of two ways. 
( I) The practice might have actually increased my 
tendency to dream, and (2) the habit of observation may 
have brought dreams to the surface which would otherwise 
have gone unremarked. In either case the figures were quite 
definite. 
I found almost at once, that is to say after about a month, 
that practically every dream that I could remember, could be 
quite clearly ascribed to one of two causes: (a) the events of 
the previous day or days, or the subjects which had interested 
and excited me during that period, and (b) the physical 
conditions of the moment. For instance, a good deal of the 
time of the experiment, I was sleeping in what might have 
been euphemistically called a houseboat. It was liable to leak; 
and on such occasions as I woke to find water trickling down 
my nose, I found that the dream from which I had wakened 
was an adventure of some sort in connection with water. (It 
is quite notorious, I believe, that many asthmatic subjects are 
pestered by dreams of having been guillotined in a previous 
incarnation. Alan Bennett, I may mention, was one such.) 
As the practice proceeds, you should find not only that 
your dreams increase in number per night, but also become 
very much fuller, clearer and more coherent. I assume that 
the reason is that the fact of your paying attention to them 
brings them to the surface. 
I am not quite sure whether this is a complete and 
adequate answer to your question 4, "How can I best bring 
my sleeping memory into my waking hours?"