ADHD: Put a Notepad By Your Bed For Ideas

One of the things I learned to do was to keep a pad and pencil next to me because ideas would pop into my mind that I’d then obsess on, hoping to not forget them.

Image by Peter Olexa from Pixabay

When I was a teenager and began meditating, one of the first things I learned to do was to keep a pad and pencil next to me because ideas would pop into my mind that I’d then obsess on, hoping to not forget them. By writing them down, though, I discovered I could let them go entirely and get right back to my mantra.

After learning how to do lucid dreaming in my 20s, I began to keep a pad next to the bed for the same reason. I bought a pen that has a built-in light specifically for writing at night. Others have discovered this, too:

Lamar in Knoxville uses a notepad to catch nighttime ideas:

I’m an independent sales rep with a three-state territory, and my best thoughts come during the night when my ADHD brain slows down a bit: things about people I should be sure to visit, or new customers for my manufacturers’ products, or ideas to suggest to them, or whatever.

I used to wake up all the time with these great ideas, in the middle of the night, or sometimes as I’m first waking up in the morning, but I never had a good place to write them down. And no matter how hard I tried, I could never remember them later.

So I was in the K-Mart (I’m pretty sure that was where I got it, a few years ago) shopping for something entirely different, and I saw this note organizer. I figured what the heck, and bought it.

It’s a little plastic holder that keeps a stack of paper, has a place for a pen, and when you push a button on it, the top pops up and a light comes on to illuminate the paper. There’s also a little digital clock on it; the whole thing cost about ten dollars.

Now when I wake up with an idea, I just reach over and push the top, the light pops up, I grab the pen and write down the idea.

That thing has paid for itself at least a thousand times over.

A fellow in Portland, Oregon told me this story:

When I was in college I took a course in psychology, and, of course, we studied dreams. We learned Freud’s ideas about them, and Carl Jung’s, and other scientists’. It was always a fascinating subject for me.

About that time I started keeping a dream diary. I had a little notebook next to the bed and whenever I woke up, I’d write down what I was dreaming

I first noticed when I started doing this that I started remembering more of my dreams. Used to be that I’d be lucky to remember one when I was waking up: now I can often remember three or four from the entire night.

Then I noticed when I started writing down my dreams, as I read through the dreams from the past week or two I could see where my mind was trying to tell me things.

It may be because of that class I took that I’m reading more into this than there is there, or that I’m experienc­ing placebo effect and making it all happen myself, but I really think that in my dreams, my unconscious mind tries to tell my conscious mind things. It tells me about conflicts and upsets and even reminds me about mundane things like not forgetting to send my niece a birthday present.

I’ve been doing this on-and-off for years now, and really find it useful. My dream diaries are all in a box in the garage, and sometimes I’ll even dig them out and read back through some of my old dreams. It’s amazing to me how closely they track what was going on in my life, and the powerful memories they can bring back to me.

I think this has to do with ADHD because I believe that lots of us Hunters are pretty scattered and often out of touch with our feelings and sometimes even out of touch with our lives. This dream diary is a great way to reconnect, to get back in touch with those things. I’ve found it very useful.