Everybody has dreams – but remembering a dream is a totally different thing. Even the people who remember dreams remember only the last dreams, the dreams of the early morning when you are just waking up, because the mechanism of memory is part of the conscious mind. Dreams happen in the unconscious; the unconscious doesn’t have any memory mechanism. Only the conscious mind has the memory mechanism. So if a dream is happening in the unconscious mind but very close to the conscious mind, then it is remembered faintly, vaguely.

In the morning when you are waking up you are coming closer to the conscious mind, from the unconscious back to the conscious mind. The last dream, the tail end, will be remembered, because it will be very close to when you wake up. So even people who remember, remember only the last dreams. They have been dreaming for almost six hours through the whole night; if they sleep for eight hours, they dream for six hours. You can catch hold of just a faint reflection of the last dream, but if you don’t catch hold of it for a few seconds, it will have gone. As you become more awake, you are farther away from the unconscious. So to different people, different things will be happening. There are people who wake up very slowly; they don’t wake up quickly, in a jump. The people who wake up quickly, in a jump, will have a different kind of memory from the people who wake up very slowly. They will have another kind of memory.

It also depends on what kind of dreams you are having. Because you are a therapist – and not only a therapist, but my therapist – your repression cannot be superficial. Because my whole teaching is: Don’t repress; live out every instinct, every feeling, every emotion. If you are living out your emotions, your feelings, then you will not have superficial dreams; your dreams will be very deep. They will be less in the unconscious and more in the collective unconscious – so deep that you will not be able to remember them. Unless a special effort is made, they cannot be remembered. And the only effort that is possible is hypnosis.

If you are hypnotized and led by your hypnotist deep into your unconscious and asked, “What is happening there? What kind of dream is going on?” only then will you be able to express it to him. When you wake up, you will not be able to remember what you have said either. It will take a long training between you and the hypnotist. After each hypnosis he has to suggest to you that you will remember it when you wake up. He has to emphasize it every time so much that it becomes a deep-rooted impression. Then you may be able to remember your dreams. But there is no need. Unless you are especially working on dreams, for some specific purpose, there is no need.

I am emphasizing that you should ignore the mind. Now the unconscious, collective unconscious, cosmic unconscious… These are all parts of the mind, and you are trying to remember them. Just the conscious mind is enough to torture you – why do you need to remember the unconscious mind?