The Mindful Way to a Good Night’s Sleep

Sometimes when I have a few minutes to kill, I enter giveaways on Goodreads. I win just often enough (about once a year) to keep trying.

My most recent win was The Mindful Way to a Good Night’s Sleep: Discover How to Use Dreamwork, Meditation, and Journaling to Sleep Deeply and Wake Up Well by Tzivia Gover. It caught my attention for several reasons:

1. Mindfulness keeps cropping up (Linda Samuels mentions it often in her blog) and I’ve seen definite benefits when I do think mindfully.
2. Lately I’ve been waking up at a ridiculously early hour and staying awake.
3. I often have fascinating dreams, with many recurring themes.
4. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around meditation, so I was hoping Gover might offer a different approach that might work for me.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad book. It’s short and sweet, at under 200 pages, and broken into lots of sections and subsections, making it easy to read. For such a small book, it covered a wide range of topics related to sleep and dreaming.

Some of the strategies were pretty basic. Is there anyone who hasn’t thought of making sure their bedroom is dark and quiet?

There were a few I can see myself trying, but some were a little woo-woo for me. Yes, I’d love to remember more details about my dreams, and I can see how writing what I remember down as soon as I wake up will help me to see patterns that might reveal what’s going on in my head. However, learning how to actively participate in my dreams so I can face my fears head on and conquer them really isn’t on my to-do list. Maybe I’d feel differently if my dreams were frightening or disturbing, but that’s rarely the case.

I definitely want to go back and try out some of the exercises. While reading the book, I had an experience where I remembered details much more clearly than usual when I woke up, and I think dream journaling in particular will be fun and educational.

If you’ve ever tried dream journaling, I’d love to hear about it.