How to Keep a Dream Journal: Understand Yourself and Your Dreams
You know, every great Dream Adventure starts and ends with your Dream Journal. Think of it like a travel journal! You can:
Write your expectations in it
Detail your journey
Look back on it to reflect and remember where you’ve been
There are SO many reasons to keep a dream journal and SO many ways to go about keeping one.. and we are going to cover many of them here.
Lets go over the WHY’s first.
Many people believe that dreams are just an escape from reality, but dreaming can be a time when you work through problems and learn to understand yourself better and find out more about who you really are. Dream journaling can help identify your unconscious thoughts and feelings, which might be too difficult to do identify consciously. Understanding what is happening with our unconscious thoughts and beliefs is a HUGE benefit when wanting to purposefully manifest a better life for ourselves.
Dream journaling can also make it easier to remember any recurring dreams you might have, and increases dream recall.
Once you keep a dream journal for a while you will start to notice patterns and recurring themes, and start to notice you might even be having dreams of the future! I had a dream one time that I was in an open-air night market and found an awesome leather journal. Almost a year to the day later, I found myself in an open-air night market where I found and awesome leather journal and I was able to look up the dream I had the year before to prove to myself and others that I wasn’t crazy!! I HAD dreamed about this one year before it happened in waking reality!
Keeping a Journal will help you identify:
Dreams of the Future
Dreams of Healing
Trips to Parallel Realities
Journalling is the KEY discovering all of this!
Most importantly, as you start noticing these patterns, themes and recurring symbols – you will realize that you now have in your possession the BEST, MOST TAILORED, PERSONALIZED DREAM DICTIONARY EVER!!
One of the most fun reasons (for me) to keep a Dream Journal is that it is a STELLAR creative tool. I get all of my ideas for my surreal digital art straight from my vivid dreams. Many famous artists, musicians and inventors throughout history have also credited their dreams with providing them some of the most brilliant ideas that they have ever had.
Keeping a journal also helps you find patterns in your dreams/feelings and can clue you in to whether or not you are on the right path to manifesting what you desire in this, physical reality. If you are making a decision about whether or not to take a certain job and you have a dream that you are in the new job but feel uncomfortable, that might be something you want to use as a decision making tool.
So now that we understand WHY keeping a dream journal is beneficial... HOW do we keep one?
First of all, there are various formats you can use to record your dreams. A pen and paper journal is the obvious option – and a great one - but there are many more.
Another way to record your dreams is to use an audio recorder. I’ve tried this in the past and it has worked out for me, but I personally find it kind of tedious to transcribe my dreams later on.
If you are more of a visual person, a sketch book might be a good option for you! You might consider sketching your dreams instead of writing them completely out.
MY favorite way of keeping a dream journal is in a digital format. I email my dreams to myself every morning, and then every once in a while I will copy and paste the emails into a word document. Once a year or so I'll print out that digital document so I also have a paper hard copy of all my dreams.
Having a digital journal is awesome, because it becomes a searchable database which is AHMAZING. If I'm noticing a lot of recurring dreams about snakes, I can search in my digital database for the word "snake" and find every snake dream I have ever had. It's truely awesome.
Doing it this way is also the easiest way for me to get my dreams down fast, keep it organized and not messy, and it’s the least amount of work because I don’t have to transcribe an audio recording or decipher messy 7am handwriting either.
So, however you choose to keep a dream journal, the most important thing is to just START keeping one!! The more dreams you track and record, the more you are building your own personal dream dictionary and database.
Stay tuned for more Dream Journalling tips! Next I will go over in detail some specific questions to ask yourself while journalling and the specific format that works best for me!
For more on this subject, check out our YouTube video and visit www.thedreamworkcoach.com for more about Dreamwork and to learn about upcoming Dreamwork Workshops!