Dream Journaling – Part 2

In part 1 of my on-going series of posts about dream journaling I talked briefly about how to remember your dreams and how to record them when you only have a few minutes. In part 2, I will be focusing on the best way to record an entire dream in order to have the most success at analyzing it.

Journaling an Entire Dream

The basic steps.

  • Remember your dream.
  • Find time to write it down.
  • Write the date.
  • Write the dream.
  • Give it a title.
  • Focus on writing only what is in the dream, and not what you are thinking at the present time.
  • Think about where you were in the dream.
  • Were you the actor performing the action or the watcher watching it? If you are unsure what identity you had, reference the post Identity: Are you the actor or the watcher?

Staying in the dream.

The best way for me to explain this is with an example.

Someone told me a dream. They mentioned something that happened while they were on vacation in the mountains the week before. I asked them if there were mountains in the dream. The answer was, “No.” I then asked them if they were on vacation in the dream.  Again a “no” answer. There was nothing in the dream that indicated it had anything to do with their vacation. I directed them back to their dream; asking what they were doing, thinking and feeling within the dream. It turns out that their dream was about a bear happily eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They associated bears with mountains then mountains with their vacation. They associated themselves away from the dream!

What happened in the example above is called free-association. We all have a tendency to do it. We need to overcome the habit in order to get to the true meaning of our dreams. Always redirect yourself back to the dream when you find that you are moving away in that manner. Stay in the dream.

A bear eating a sandwich in a dream could be about many things.

Things including but not limited to:

  • Children or grandchildren
  • Food
  • Someone who loves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
  • A need to go into hibernation
  • A silly random happy thought
  • Etc.

When you free associate away from the dream, you lose all of the opportunities to explore its true meaning.

How to stay in the dream.

The best way I know to do this is to ask the following questions:

  • Was this action actually in my dream?
  • Was this thought actually in my dream?
  • Was this feeling actually in my dream?
  • Was this object in my dream?

Teaching yourself how to stay in your dream will also teach you how to keep from free-associating away from it. They are inter-connected principles.

After you have mastered this, you can begin to record what I term now-thoughts.

Explanation of now-thought versus dream-thought.

You may be writing down a dream and you remember something that happened two days ago that could be meaningful. The fact that it popped into your head at the moment when you wrote down a particular part of your dream tells you that you need to pay attention to it. In order to keep it from being confused with your dream thoughts, feelings and happenings, you need to note that it is a now-thought. Simply write the words “now-thought” before you write the actual thought.

I stress over and over to only write what is in your dream, so why am I telling you how to incorporate your now-thoughts?

Once you’ve mastered the art of staying in the dream, then you can begin to incorporate now-thoughts when you’re writing. This will add more depth when it’s time to analyze your dream. When you begin to analyze the dream, you will decide whether the now-thoughts pertain to the meaning of the dream or lead you away from the dream. You can incorporate them into your analysis if relevant or discard them if irrelevant.

In part 3 of dream journaling I will discuss some steps that will help you find meaning in the dream you’ve just finished writing down! I will be discussing the clues you give yourself to help you understand the dream better. In the first paragraph of my blog post on Cars: Moving through dreams, I introduce dream clues, if you want to take a look.