Why & How To Keep A Dream Journal
Dreams are more than just your brain’s reruns from the day or for swapping weird dream stories with your friends and colleagues.
Dreams can be powerful messages about problems or stresses in your life. If you have regular dreams about the same situation over and over, being trapped or running late or being shamed in public, maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something.
It can be hard to remember your dreams for more than a few minutes. Keeping a dream journal can help you keep a record of those messages from your subconscious. There are other benefits too.
Benefits of Keeping a Dream Journal
1. Improve Your Problem Solving
Once you start keeping a dream journal, you’ll see how your dreams reflect what’s going on in your waking life. Taking the time to note down and analyze your dreams sends a signal to your subconscious that you’re listening. And as you listen, you get more insight into your problems, and your dreams become easier to understand and solve.
2. Reduce Your Anxiety
Bad dreams, the ones you wake up glad to escape from, tell you a lot about your deepest fears. They can help you pinpoint areas of your life where you can take steps to avoid the fear that surfaces in your dream. Journaling enables you to process the issue that’s causing anxiety.
3. Connect With Your Creativity
Some of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers and artists have had inspiration come to them in dreams. Einstein is supposed to have dreamed his theory of relativity and thereby changed the world of physics.
Keeping a journal of your subconscious dream life allows you to tap into your creative mind. The logical part of your mind quietens, while fantasy and imagination take over leading to some of the stranger aspects of dream life. Capturing these images and stories in your dream journal can give you a world of new ideas to explore.
4. You’ll Remember More of Your Dreams
Getting into the habit of writing down your dreams will encourage your conscious mind to access your dream life. Journaling tells your mind that this is important, and your brain’s filters will reset to prioritize capturing your dreams. It puts dreams on your radar!
As your dream journaling becomes part of your routine, your dream recall will improve, and you’ll find you remember more of your dreams and more and more details. You might even find you start to have lucid dreams where you become aware that you’re dreaming and can alter the narrative of your dream.
How To Keep A Dream Journal
Do you sometimes have vivid dreams or dreams that seem to be full of messages you can’t quite decipher? Maybe you’ve had good ideas or answers to problems in your dreams.
The problem is that often you forget your dreams, or the essential details stay just out of reach. Maybe a dream journal is the answer? Keeping a dream journal will allow you to capture the essence of your dreams and maybe see patterns in the messages coming from your subconscious. Here are five easy steps you can take to start keeping a record of your dreams.
1. Be Prepared to Write down Your Dreams
You need to be able to write down your dreams before you even get out of bed. Before you go to sleep, set the conscious intention to journal your dreams, send the message to your brain that you want to remember as much as you can.
Keep a pen and notebook on your nightstand so you can reach out and grab them without having to search around. You can also jot down notes in your smartphone. The important thing is to get it in writing!
2. Journal Before You Do Anything Else
Even before you’re properly awake, you can capture as many dream details as possible before full consciousness sweeps them away. Even checking the time can be enough of a distraction to allow your dreams to seep away.
Write without critiquing and try to get down the things that feel important to you.
3. Write Down the Essentials
It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember every detail of your dreams. Sometimes you might wake up and not be sure whether you dreamed or not. Write down whatever you’re feeling or what emotions you wake up with. Just focus on getting into the habit of writing every morning.
4. Make Connections Between Your Dreams
After a while, you’ll be able to see patterns in your dreams. Do you dream about the same person or the same situation? Are you in the same place? Analyzing your dreams for common threads and images can help you read your dreams and understanding what they’re trying to tell you.
5. Use Your Dreams to Improve Your Life
Once you can see how your experiences, your worries, your hopes, and fears are reflected in your dreams, you can use that information to make changes in your waking life. As you address the anxieties that surface in your dreams, you’ll start to live a calmer, less stressed life and even sleep better.
