The Complete Book of Dreams

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

USING A DREAM JOURNAL

For many, their dream journal is the centerpiece of their dreamwork practice, a capsule in which their oneiric odysseys are preserved. A dream journal serves as a looking-glass chronicle through which we can reconnect to the hopes, wishes, fears, and concerns that channel through our minds and hearts, which are uniquely revealed during the night when we sleep and dream. Our dream journals are replete with autobiographical reflections that help us to know ourselves better, all the while also having us remember the exquisite power that emerges when we tap into our imaginal mind. In addition to being a coffer of self-awareness treasures, our dream journals not only serve as the destination for our insights, but also as a tool that helps us to discover the wisdom that our dreams yield.

The Array of Dream Journals

There are numerous dream journals available. While some feature beautiful covers and inspirational quotes, there are others that are designed to help encourage you to remember your dreams and record them in ways in which you can access their deeper levels. Some come complete with section headings ready-made for you to scribe the date, title, and some visual notes, while others include journaling prompts, checkboxes to help you describe the dream, and spaces dedicated to both recording and reflecting upon it. If you’ve not found a dream journal that’s visually appealing, helps you to stay motivated, and also acts as a guide to help unearth what your dreams may mean, there’s another option: you can create your own. It’s not difficult nor time-consuming, and it can be one of the most powerful steps you can take to connect to the heart of the wisdom that your dreams contain.

All it requires is creating different sections in your journal pages, areas that help you to organize some of your dream details in a way that mirrors your interests and meets your needs. It’s a powerful tool to help you zero in on the numerous facets of your dreams and further understand just what they may mean. This chapter will give you some tips and strategies that can boost your journaling practice to take your dreamwork to the next level.

Types of Journals

Before we get into the details on how to make a customized journal that addresses the things that you’re most interested in assessing and analyzing, let’s start at the beginning, and consider what type of book to use. There are generally two basic options from which to choose. Regardless of which you select, choose a size that will work best for you in terms of providing you a good amount of space to write. Even if you don’t use it all, not feeling constrained may open up the channel to your memory; it’s a way of sending a message to your subconscious mind that you know that there is something vast that wants to be shared and understood, and that you’re giving yourself adequate space where it can be documented. By doing so, you’re imparting a greater sense of possibility and encouragement, which can inspire a better ability to understand the vast layers of your dream.

NOTEBOOK

There are a range of notebook possibilities from which to choose. You could use a simple spiral-bound book. Or, you could opt for a bound notebook; if so, find one that lies flat when opening it, as you’ll soon see how instrumental working with facing pages is. For most people, blank pages offer more freedom of expression than ones that are lined, allowing them to also have a space to draw or doodle if they choose. Others prefer those that are dotted, as this helps them to make lines to readily demarcate different sections. See what works best for your particular journaling style. Given that you’ll want to number the pages, if it already has page numbers printed on it, that can be a plus. As you’ll soon see, if you choose to use a notebook, you’ll be making space on each page for different sections in which you will fill in an array of information related to your dreams.

BINDER BOOK

Another approach is to create templated pages on the computer, print them out, three-hole punch them, and keep them in a binder. You’d print them on two sides, with each page having a different layout on the front and back (you’ll see examples of this in the coming pages). This allows you to not only record and organize different aspects of your dreams but also take advantage of there being facing pages with which to work. Like with the notebook option, make sure that the binder opens flat for ease of use.

Dream Journal Page Designs

Designing your own dream journal is not only easy and creative, but it can also help you to access deeper levels of insights. Whether you want a design that lets you capture the basics or a bespoke one that allows you to track a variety of different dream variables that may be of interest, in the following pages you’ll find suggestions on how to organize your journal to optimize your dreamwork.

As you’ll see, in each of these layout options, I suggest that instead of having each night’s dream featured on subsequent pages, that you allocate two facing pages — one of the left and one on the right side of your journal — for each dream. Not only does this expansive space give your psyche a sense of freedom so that it doesn’t feel limited as to what it can capture and document, but it also inspires your ability to make more connections. One of my favorite ways to use these facing pages, and which serves as the foundation for my approach, is to document initial memories of a dream on the left-side page and scribe reflections on the dream’s significance on the right-side page. Being able to see both your dream memories and your reflections at once enables a dialogue that not only engages your mind, but can also bring through originally forgotten dream details. It’s a much easier and more efficient approach than having to flip back and forth between pages that contain information on the same dream. And there’s another benefit: if you’re someone who likes to write their dream directly into their journal rather than take an intermediate step (as we discussed in the last chapter), having a dedicated space that’s separate from any evaluation or reflection can help you keep your dream journal more organized.

BASIC JOURNAL DESIGN

The basic dream journal design suits many people quite well. For the basic one, you just need a space for the following information, which you arrange on facing pages.

Date: Including the date you had the dream is, of course, essential. Given that we often don’t know the exact moment we had a dream, and we may be interested in understanding our dream in the context of the previous day’s events, consider including the dates of both the evening you went to bed and the morning you awoke in your journal.

Memories: Allocate a good portion of the left-hand page for documenting all that you recalled from your dream. You can either write directly in here as you’re recalling your dream or transcribe what you originally wrote elsewhere, or what you audio or video recorded when you first arose.

Reflections: This is the section in which you document what you feel the dream signifies. It’s where you record your ongoing thoughts on the different layers of the dream, and what message it may be offering you.

Page Number: Numbering the pages will allow you to create a Table of Contents so that you can readily rediscover a dream you had (for more on this, see here).

Title: Giving your dream a title can help you to further distill its meaning and significance. You can also use it in your journal’s Table of Contents when cataloging your dreams. Additionally, giving it a title is another opportunity to express your creativity in your dreamwork.

On the next pages, you’ll see an example of a basic journal design layout. You can either draw these sections in your notebook journal, or if you’re making templates to print out — or use in a digital journal — you can use them as the basis of your design.

BESPOKE JOURNAL DESIGN

While the basic design works great, you may find that you want to capture other details related to your dreams. Including additional categories of information will not only make your dream journal richer, but it will also further enhance your ability to see what your dreams may be revealing. Plus, it’s a great system to help you understand patterns that may weave throughout your dreams (for more on this, see here).

Here are some ideas of categories that you can include in your dream journal. Experiment with the ones that seem most interesting; you need not use all of them. Try different ones at different times to see which ones help you to best connect with your dreams and understand what they mean. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list. As you continue to work with your dreams, you may find additional subjects that are of interest that you may want to include.

Feelings

Dreams often have an emotional tone. Sometimes it’s even easier to connect with the feeling tone of the dream than it is to recover the who, what, where, and when details that it featured. Additionally, as our dreams are often related to the processing of opportunities and challenges from our waking life — and the related emotions that they bring forth — what we were feeling before we fell asleep often informs our dreams.

And as we know, the demarcation between dreaming and waking isn’t that stringent. Often what is catalyzed in our dreams infuses itself into our waking awareness afterward, sometimes with such tenacity that it feels hard to shake off the emotional residue that a dream imparted. As such, questions that address our feelings may yield interesting insights. Consider adding a section to your journal with the following or similar questions. You can even fill out the first one before you fall asleep.

▪ How did I feel when I went to bed?

▪ What feelings arose in my dreams?

▪ How do I feel upon arising?

▪ How do I feel after exploring my dreams?

Day’s Reflections

Our days and nights weave together, forming the whole tapestry of who we are. Our dreams often reflect our digesting and absorbing the ideas, situations, and feelings that occurred the preceding day. As such, noting daily occurrences may help us to further understand our dreams. Consider including these prompts in your dream journal. You could, of course, answer these questions the night before you go to sleep; just change the orientation of the questions if you do.

▪ What was I grateful for yesterday?

▪ What did I worry about yesterday?

▪ What significant events, if any, transpired yesterday?

Dream Incubation Intention

As we saw in chapter 11, dream incubation is a practice in which you intentionally ask your dream to reveal specific insights that are of import to you. If you are incubating a dream, it’s helpful to include the intention in your journal before you go to sleep. This, of course, helps you keep a record of it, and then hones your focus in the morning when you begin to discern what your dream revealed about your query. It also provides another benefit: it’s not uncommon to have created the most powerful dream intention as you’re unwinding in bed, only to not remember it the next morning.

▪ Dream incubation intention

Symbols, Images, and Themes

Dreams are rich in symbols, images, and themes that weave throughout. Sometimes we may not even remember the narrative of our dreams, although we can readily recall the iconic visuals that were included within. The images may be those whose meaning is obvious, or they may be rife with substrata of unique meanings that take time to access. These symbols, images, and themes may include anything in the dream that you found striking, whether obtusely mundane or bizarrely out of the ordinary. Note any colors or numbers that may have appeared. If you remember seeing or hearing words, record those as well.

Unpacking the significance of what a dream symbol means can be a fascinating foundation of our dreamwork, as we come to learn how it speaks to us and reflects the complex weave of who we are. As such, consider adding a section in your journal that highlights the symbols and images that were featured in your dreams. You could have themes woven in there or featured as a separate section.

▪ Symbols and images

▪ Themes

Outcomes Inspired

As we reflect upon our dreams, we may find that we get some really powerful takeaways. Some of these may even point us toward actions we feel we are ready to embark upon. Including these in your dream journal will serve as another testament to the healing and wisdom-inspiring benefits that dreams have in your life.

▪ Takeaways

▪ Outcomes inspired

Sleeping Environment

The more you do dreamwork, the more you may come to see that certain factors influence the type of dreams you have, and their quality and contents. Some of these may center upon your sleeping environs, as well as factors that influenced your slumber. By tracking these, you may begin to see further interlacing patterns that are not only interesting but also informative. For example, you could include such questions as the following in your dream journal.

▪ How many hours of sleep did I have?

▪ How was the quality of my sleep?

▪ What was I thinking about when I went to sleep?

▪ Where did I sleep?

▪ With whom did I sleep?

▪ Did I have sex before I went to sleep?

▪ Did I awaken in the night?

▪ At what approximate time did the dream occur?

Lucid Dreaming

If you lucid dream, you can also track important information in your journal that can help to enhance your practice, let alone allow you to document your awareness-filled adventures. This can include not only details of your oneiric journeys, but also the dream signs you recognized and techniques that you used to foster the dream.

▪ The sign/s that let me recognize I was in a lucid dream

▪ The lucid-dreaming techniques I used last night

AstroDreamwork

For those who are interested in weaving together astrological insights with their dreamwork, you can include additional variables in your journal. These may comprise the phase and/or sign of the Moon, the current astrological passages/transits through which you’re moving, or anything else that you find provides you clues as to the meaning of your dreams. (See chapter 16 for more on AstroDreamwork.)

▪ Moon phase

▪ Moon sign

▪ Current astrological passages/transits

The journal layout shown here includes several of these categories with spaces wherein you can document your dream incubation intention; symbols, images, and themes; and the outcomes that were inspired. Again, there are a multitude of different categories that you can choose to use when organizing your dream journal.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

Not only does having categorized sections in your dream journal allow you to dig into them deeper, but it also helps you to recognize patterns that may exist. For example, if you track the images that appear in your dreams and also what you were thinking about before you fell asleep, you may be able to recognize that a certain symbol seems likely to appear when your pre-slumber thoughts were centered on a certain subject. As such, its appearance in your dreams may then have you realize that it’s serving as a beacon that’s symbolizing something about this particular waking-life consideration. This then allows you to approach your dream decoding with fresh insights.

Shown here, you’ll see an example of tracking themes, evening thoughts, and a recurring symbol — a crow, in this instance — that may appear in numerous dreams. Through this, we can see patterns that may emerge. In this case, the presence of the crow more often than not relates to dream themes that have to do with movement and shifting elevations, as well as pre-sleep ruminations related to work. By knowing this, next time a crow appears, or we find ourselves moving from one level to another, we may look to our dream to see what it may be revealing about a work situation.

Dreaming Rituals on the Road

As you’re always dreaming, you can bring your intentional dreamwork practice with you wherever you go. Your portable dream kit may include your dream journal, dream pillow, and flower essences that aid your slumber. Bring them — especially your journal — along with you in your carry-on, as you never know what elevated visions you may have when at high elevations. Don’t forget to pack the things that help you sleep well and have you feel at home wherever you are. If you’re unsure about the light and noise environment of your hotel room, bring a sleep mask, earplugs, and/or a mini-pink noise machine with you. You can also still enjoy your favorite centering essential oils on the road: use a travel- size aromatherapy diffuser or pack a premade mist that you can spritz yourself with before sleeping. Also, a dream altar will travel: bring along crystals, candles, sacred images, etc., and create a mini-altar on your hotel nightstand.

You could do this cross-referencing with any variables. For example, if you track themes and Moon phases, you may find that your dreams around the Full Moon are oftentimes more rife with conflict than those at other times of the month. Or, if you observe your feelings and your sleeping environment, you may potentially find a connection between the quality of slumber you had and the emotional tone infused in your dream. How to do this is easy: just create a log in your dream journal where you cross-reference different categories of dream information.

Allocate several pages in the beginning of your dream journal to create a Table of Contents. It should include basic information, such as the date and title of each dream, as well as the page number. This will allow you to have an ongoing inventory of your dreams. Even just briefly scanning it will provide you with important insights based upon their titles (see here).

Other Pages to Include in Your Dream Journal

Here are two other categories that you can include in your dream journal.

Dream Themes

Create a page in your journal where you catalog a list of themes, images, people, and places that commonly appear in your dreams. This way, if you’re struggling to remember a dream one morning, you can glance at the theme page to see if it will shake your memory, helping you recall some of the who, what, and where that wove through your dream.