Dream Journaling: 7 Top Tips and Benefits
If you're serious about learning how to work with your dreams, keeping a dream journal is foundational. One of the first steps to working with your dreams is establishing good dream recall, and there's no better way to improve your recall than by recording your dreams regularly. Dreams are elusive; most of our dreams are forgotten. Even our remembered dreams, if not written down, will fade from memory over time.
Why a dream journal?
Dream journaling is a self-reflective practice for personal growth.
Since dreams are intuitive, creative, and multidimensional, dream journaling can help build your intuitive muscle and nonlinear ways of knowing as you bridge dreams and waking life and their relationship.
Collecting and reflecting on your dreams with curiosity, over time, helps you start to notice patterns, processes, and insights about your life that you may have otherwise missed.
Our dreams are a vital part of our lives, helping us to evolve as humans; therefore, they are worth recording and paying attention to.
Your dream journal supports your mental health by being a consistent space where you can slow down, reflect, and get a wellspring of inspiration. Instead of reaching for a phone and plugging into someone else’s world, plug into your own boundless imagination!
Dream journaling can:
Reveal patterns of stagnation and growth, help you face your fears and provide you with creative solutions to your challenges.
Inspire you in many creative ways. The list of contributions to science, art, and culture that directly come from dreams is long. Your dreams offer you a constant stream of innovative insights and fresh perspectives if you pay attention.
Help you process your emotions and point out ways you can heal.
Connect us to the deeper part of ourselves and to something greater than ourselves, giving us a place of belonging and glimpses into numinous, mystical, and spiritual experiences.
This is why I believe that your dream journals are the most magical books you will ever possess!
Early on, I had recurring tidal wave nightmares. These dreams reflected the overwhelm and anxiety I felt emotionally, but after learning how to be in touch with my emotions and allowing myself to feel them, the oceans in my dream became calm and beautiful. I started seeing whales and dolphins, and a feeling of comfort with my emotional life grew. Over time, I was going underwater in my dreams and finding a rich and beautiful life there.
Once, during an emotional rough patch, I saw a deep sea monster covered in green scales, with a horn on her head and red, glowing eyes. She was filled with immense anger due to her prolonged confinement beneath the ocean, and she wanted my help. This “monster” was the red-eyed monster of jealousy, which I had buried as a teenager after some deep betrayals I had experienced. I had no idea this part of me still lurked; she was buried so deep.
Instead of being scared, I was curious.
I felt sad to see how much pain she was in. She reached her hand out of the sea to touch me, and with empathy and compassion, I turned toward her, healing a forgotten part of myself in the process.
Here are 7 tips to help you get started with your dream journal practice:
Where and how to record: Choose a way to record that will work for you, either a pen and paper journal or a device. Keep it next to your bed. Start by jotting down a few keywords or phrases, and then record the entire dream later after you wake up. Record the date and as many details as you can, including the feelings, quality of light, sounds, smells, taste, characters, and environment. The more details you record, the more it will help you when you work on your dream. If you are having trouble remembering your dreams, see my previous blog post here.
Life events: Somewhere on the side, you can track any events or important happenings in your life, such as the moon phase, astrological events, holidays, major life changes, etc. Later you can correlate the imagery in your dreams to your waking life. This is the beauty of dream journaling and how it can become a significant personal growth practice.
If you don’t remember: If there is no dream, write something anyway—such as the date, any feelings you experienced upon waking, or simply that no dream was remembered. This practice will help establish the habit and signal to your dreaming mind that you are serious about remembering your dreams.
Title: By creating a captivating title, you will be able to remember your dream in a snapshot and locate it more easily when going through your journal. Trying to encapsulate the most essential part of the dream is also fun!
Fragments: Don’t discount the small snippets of dreams you do remember. Think of fragments like a hologram of the whole. They can provide as much rich insight as longer dreams, so write them down. I have observed that many seemingly "tiny" fragments can reveal rich dream material.
Track: As you begin accumulating dreams, you can start to track common themes, metaphors, symbols, colors, and characters. Additionally, you can track the types of dreams you have, such as lucid dreams, nightmares, recurring dreams, healing dreams, etc. I will be writing more about the many types of dreams we can have in a future blog.
Reflect: Spend time each week honestly reflecting on the recurring challenges, conflicts, or vulnerabilities you face in your dreams, as well as your life and the moments where you tried something new, had a moment of growth, courage, or new understanding. And always, take the opportunity to practice self-compassion as you move through these inner landscapes, which can be both exhilarating and scary.
I highly recommend using an old-school paper journal even if you use an app. There is something about how handwriting fires our brain and memory that apps can’t do. Find what works for you. The key is to make it practical and inviting.
Reflective practice is increasingly becoming obsolete in our screen-filled lives. Engaging in a regular dream journaling practice is an intuitive, creative, and powerful way to explore your inner life and creates a simple, meaningful ritual rooted in connection, mindfulness, and embodied knowing, which, in a technologically driven world, we need now more than ever.
May your dreams be golden. ✨
Kris