3 Reasons to Keep a Dream Journal

Source: Kelly Bulkeley

As a practice of self-reflection, keeping a dream journal has many advantages. It is fairly simple and essentially free, always available, always personalized to you and your life situation, and always inviting you to connect with larger perspectives on reality. Whether it’s in a written notebook, an audio recording, or an app like Elsewhere.to, it has never been easier to learn from your dreaming self.

There are three especially important benefits that come from keeping a dream journal.

1. The opportunity to gain psychological insights into your present life. When you keep track of your dreams over months and years, you can’t help but notice a variety of recurrent themes and patterns that reflect important emotional concerns in your waking life. The insights may be uncomfortably honest at times, but vital and valuable nevertheless. You will notice patterns involving your relationships with family and friends, your health, work or schooling, financial conditions, cultural interests (e.g., music, video games, sports), and religious/spiritual beliefs. At this level, a dream journal serves as a kind of psychological mirror that offers you a remarkably accurate source of self-knowledge.

2. A dream journal is a gift to your future self. Over time, the information in your journal ripens—it becomes even more psychologically nourishing as you begin to see the deeper rhythms and cycles of your dreaming-waking existence. Each dream takes on new and greater significance as your journal grows, and you may find that a certain dream can only be understood after many years have passed and subsequent dreams with the same theme have helped you clarify what was happening in the original version. Similarly, you may find that a new challenge in your waking life has been prefigured by earlier dreams that anticipated the challenge and offered preparatory guidance for dealing with it.

3. A third benefit of keeping a dream journal goes beyond the personal to the collective levels of meaning and significance. This may not be of interest to everyone, but if you follow your dreams over time, you will likely record at least a few unusual instances of dreams that correlate with healing from illness, dreams that inspire creative ideas, dreams that anticipate future events, dreams of those who are dead appearing as if alive, and dreams that react to historical events like wars, elections, and natural disasters. Although rare, these kinds of dreams connect you to powers greater than your individual ego, with implications that extend far beyond the personal sphere. This is the point at which keeping a dream journal almost inevitably becomes a kind of spiritual practice, a practice of deep and sustained exploration of life, love, death, and desire.