THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
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Some dreams fade by breakfast. Others stay with you for a lifetime.
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Nick Crouch was a year below me at school. We knew each other loosely and attended the same after-school taekwondo sessions. He was a lovely lad, but after leaving school, I lost touch with him. Around twelve years later, without having consciously thought about him, I had a dream that has stayed with me ever since.
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I was walking through a hot, sandy landscape beneath a cloudless blue sky. There were palm trees beside the path and rubble ahead. Hearing someone screaming, I went to help—and found Nick, badly injured among the debris.
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As I crouched beside him, he became calm. He placed his hand on my forearm and said:
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“Don’t worry, Russ. Everything will be alright.”
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I woke bolt upright, heart racing. The next morning, I told my girlfriend, but I didn’t record the dream or the exact time.
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A couple of weeks later, I saw condolences on his sister’s Facebook page. Nick had died in Iraq. Through the article she shared, I learned that he had served in the paratroopers and later worked in private security. The accompanying photograph stopped me cold: blue sky, sand, palm trees and rubble. To me, it looked like the scene I remembered.
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My girlfriend and I tried to piece together the dates. They seemed close, but without a dated dream entry, I couldn’t establish the timing for certain but it was within a day or so.
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I still cannot explain that experience. To me, it felt like a remarkable moment of connection with someone I had barely known. It left me with a question I’m still exploring:
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How connected are we?
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That sense of wonder—and the frustration of not having recorded the dream—helped inspire Don’t Lose Your Dreams.
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EXPLORE MORE IN THE BOOK - Released soon, Subscribe below to join mailing list to hear first!!
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Don’t Lose Your Dreams tells the fuller story and explores the questions it opened about dreams, consciousness, creativity and human connection.
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Alongside my own experiences, I explore historical accounts of dreams associated with creative breakthroughs and discoveries, different approaches to interpretation, and practical ways to preserve your own night time experiences.​​
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GUIDED DREAM CAPTURE & TRANSLATION
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Dreams fade quickly. This is the best method I’ve found for capturing mine—and I’m sharing it here so you can try it too. You don’t need to understand AI to use it.
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CLICK HERE TO START YOUR DREAM LOG
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When you wake from a dream, open the tool using the link above. It asks you one simple question at a time. Read the question, tap the microphone on your phone’s keyboard and speak your answer. You can keep your eyes closed while you talk, only glancing at the screen for the next question—helpful when you’re half asleep and trying to hold onto those disappearing details.
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It guides you through who appeared, where you were, what happened and how you felt. Then it asks for your immediate associations with the people and emotions you mentioned: the first word, feeling or memory that comes to mind. There’s no need to make everything tidy or understand it straight away. Just share what you remember, in your own words.
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Once you’re finished, AI gathers your answers and holds the dream back up to you. It offers a brief summary, a possible symbolic perspective drawing on Freud and Jung, and a fictional retelling inspired by Greek mythology. Hearing your dream as a myth can give you a little distance from it, helping you notice something you might have missed from inside the experience.
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You decide what feels meaningful. These perspectives are starting points for your own reflection, rather than definitive answers about what your dream means. The finished translation appears in one copyable box: tap Copy, open the notes on your phone and paste it into your dream diary.
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This is how I capture and log my own dreams. I’m currently finishing the accompanying book, Don’t Lose Your Dreams, which explores the method, different approaches to interpretation and the personal experience behind this project—a dream that connected me with someone in an extraordinary way, shared elsewhere on this page. My research also explores accounts of dreams that have inspired remarkable creative work and discoveries, helping shape the world we live in.