Dream Diary Top 6 Proven Tips and Benefits
Writing your dreams in a Dream Diary upon waking helps recall, analysis, and building knowledge of your private interior dictionary. I remember my late father, who was the half of the couple who came into the room middle of the night to tend to nightmares. He would sit down on the bed, asking me to recount my dream.
Not only would he listen intently to my nighttime adventures, but he would also then offer a waking script for me to recite as I fell back to sleep, saying, “I’m going to have a nightmare! I’m going to have a nightmare and I’m ready for it! Bring it on!”
My dad wasn’t studied on Jung, who would have given his approval to this wonderful example of what he called “active imagination”. Of course, as you can imagine, once I recited those words, I never had a nightmare! My father had succeeded in arming me.
He gave me my first experiences with capturing a dream, and problem-solving, before I was even able to write.
This story is a great lesson for parents, because simply the act of asking your child to recount their dream at once, signals both the importance of the child and of the dream! It is the opposite of a sentence like, “Oh. It was just a dream. Go back to sleep”.
The story captures the most important reason why you want to remember your dreams. A dream is the interior conversation that takes place between your conscious and your unconscious mind. At the first level, this discussion is triggered by a waking event that either happened to you, or that you thought about yesterday. Further, it’s about something or perhaps someone who is bugging you!
The gift is in knowing that this interior discussion results in solutions. Yes. The solution to what you want to do about something that’s bugging you this week arrives in your dream before it makes its way to your conscious mind. If you’re a person who doesn’t remember your dreams, you’re going to get the message regardless. It’s just how you get it faster if you remember and if you understand the language.
Dream Diary Tips to Put in Motion to Help Your Recall
- Intention is everything. Start by making a decision that you are going to remember. Even one scene, one picture, or one feeling. Leave a pen and your dream Journal beside the bed.
- Before going to sleep, write a few memories about your day so you have a base to consider in the morning when reviewing your dream.
- When you wake, and especially if you don’t remember, lie in bed and just be in touch with your feelings. This starts your day with a small alone time to process and notice where your feelings are at. This “alone time” first thing in the morning, is so wonderful you might create a morning routine of it!
- Once you begin writing, write in the present tense. It will also help trigger your memory. The simple act of writing begins the phenomenal experience of remembering backwards! Yes. That’s what happens. You are, of course, beginning at the end and once you write the first thing you remember, the last scene in the dream, miraculously and suddenly you’ll notice you’ll remember the thing that happened immediately before that… and then just before that!
6 Benefits to Recalling and Writing Your Dream Diary
- There is no better place to learn your personal language; and at the same time to decode your dream, than by writing it. Writing gives you information and language right there for the taking, different than the fleeting experience of recounting your dream aloud.
- Seeing your dream on paper allows you to map it! Mapping your dream brings the analysis to the page. In recounting your dream aloud it’s easy to lose small details which I have so often discovered are the solution to the issue!
- Writing inspires ideas and complex out of the box thinking. It also helps remove creative blocks. James Taylor, one of my favorite entertainers, describes when he is writing a song, and feels lost for words, takes a little afternoon nap. He describes it like dropping a bucket down the well and sure enough, once he wakes, lyrics flow miraculously.
- A dream diary allows you to see the direction you are moving towards on a given subject and gets you in touch with your intuition. Here’s a recent Dream Catcher column I wrote at oprahdaily.com about a woman who dreamed about a home with no foundation; the message revealing what Oprah herself describes as a “whisper”.
- Writing gives you the opportunity to notice patterns and your personal vocabulary, especially when looking back! I discovered when a freight elevator appears in my dream, it is the same thing as me saying to myself, “I don’t feel like I have my ground”. That’s because of the wobbly floor and the too big space around me. Where are you going to find that definition in a dream dictionary? Nowhere! Your language comes from your own personal life experiences. You cannot look it up in a book.
- Finally, don’t be afraid to step outside your comfort zone and draw the dream or do a vision board of it! A dream diary doesn't just have to be written paragraphs.
Do you keep a dream diary? How has writing in your dream journal helped you? Tell us in the comments!
