When working with your dreams – be that interpreting them, dispelling nightmares, or learning to lucid dream – one step stands before all of them: remembering your dreams. If you can’t remember your dreams, then you can’t make proper use of dreaming techniques because you will have no way of knowing if they worked. There are those of us with naturally high degrees of dream recall, but even that can be improved upon over time with a dream journal.

Dream journaling gives us a method to improve dream recall and catalog our dreams for later use. Doing this properly is immensely helpful in identifying dream signs, learning more about yourself, and learning to lucid dream.

In this article:

• Does Everybody Dream?
• How to Develop Dream Recall
• Dream Journaling Best Practices
• Uses of dream journals/ Get the most out of your journal

Does Everybody Dream?

The short answer is yes. Virtually all humans dream each night (except in very rare cases). When a person says that they do not usually dream, what they actually mean is that they do not usually remember their dreams upon waking. This is an important distinction to make, as it provides hope for those who don’t usually recall their dreams but wish to learn. And the good news is that by even reading this far, you’ve begun to develop your dream recall. 

How to Develop Dream Recall

Setting the intent to remember your dreams is an important first step. When you express the desire to explore your dreams, you are telling your mind to put a greater importance on remembering them. By simply having the interest and reading this article, you’ve set the intention to remember your dreams. It can also be helpful to set the intention out loud. Next time you lay down to go to sleep, try saying something to the effect of “I will remember my dreams tonight”. 

While setting intention is a helpful method, it isn’t the only thing you can do. A much more active approach you can take is to also start dream journaling.

Dream journaling is the practice of recording and cataloging your dreams. This can be done with pen and paper, typed out, recorded in voice memos, or virtually any other way you can think to consistently record your dreams.

All you have to do to begin dream journaling is to write down (or record) everything you can remember about your dreams when you wake up. Start with anything at all you can remember, even if it seems insignificant at the time. If you only have vague memories from the dream, start by thinking about how you felt within the dream or how you feel now and see if that emotion reveals more about the dream.

Anything you can remember is better than nothing. A color, a feeling, a person that you think was there, etc. The important part is you write down something each day. As time goes on, you should start to remember more about your dreams if you keep up with this practice. 

Dream Journaling Best Practices

In essence, dream journaling really is as simple as just writing down your dreams, but there are certain methods that you should use to get the most out of your efforts:

Keep the Dates

Keep track of the dates of each dream. If you’re using a physical journal, try to leave some space between entries so you can go back and write more if it comes to you. This will help you identify trends over time and recognize if your dreams are starting to change in meaningful ways.

Name Your Journal Entries

As well as dating them, you should give your entries a short name that describes the main parts of what was happening in the dream. If you keep up with your journal, you’ll find that in no time you have quite a bit of material to look back on. Once you have a few dozen entries or so, it can be really hard to look back for specific dreams, so naming them will help to jog your memory and find what you’re looking for more easily.

Write Down More Than Just The Main Plot Points

When done consistently, dream journaling should help you start to remember more and more about your dreams. This is a good thing, but it comes with a downside: the more you remember, the more you will need to write in your journal entries. Because of this, it can be tempting to just write down the major points of your dreams, but if you do this you will be missing out a vast amount of important details. We’ll get to why the details are so important in just a bit, but just know for now that you should journal as thoroughly as you can for best results.

Start Writing First Thing When You Wake Up

This advice seems obvious, but it is necessary to make note of this. Start journaling first thing everyday when you wake up. If you have a situation where you can’t usually take time to focus on your dreams in the morning, consider waking up slightly earlier to write in your journal, or making it a point to take a few minutes to yourself each day immediately after waking up. Journaling can still be done even if it isn’t immediately after waking, but every minute will tend to make you forget more of your dreams.

Be Consistent

The best way to increase your memory of dreams is to stay consistent with the practice of thinking about and writing them down first thing in the morning. Even if you fall out of the habit, make a concerted effort to start journaling as much as you can or anytime you remember to.

Use a Digital Notebook If Possible

This part is optional, but it can come in extremely handy depending on what you wish to get out of your dream journal.

Dream journals can end up containing quite a lot of information if you consistently write in them, making it difficult to look back through them. If you use a digital journal (such as a notepad app), you can make it much easier to look for recurring patterns and dreams signs. For instance, if one day you realize that you often dream of sharks, a digital journal is much easier to search in and pull up all the dreams that had sharks in them. 

If you choose to record your notes as audio clips each morning, try to do so in an app that has talk to text so that you can go back and read what you’ve recorded instead of having to listen to them all (which takes a lot of time). 

There are quite a few dream journaling apps on the market, both free and paid, and most of them have been made with the idea in mind that you will go back and look for key phrases or recurring elements in your dreams.

Look Back Through Your Journal Often

A few of these tips have had the same thing in mind: making it easier to look back and sort through your dream journal. This is why we say that dream journaling isn’t just recording your dreams, it involves cataloging them too. 

Once you have a sizable amount of dreams to look back on, you should spend some time each week looking over your dream journal. You should look for anything that keeps showing up in your dreams, whether that be an emotion, a person, a place, etc.

There are two main reasons why this is a good practice. The first is that identifying things that frequently show up in your dreams is a great place to start learning more about yourself. For instance, If snakes show up in every dream that makes you wake up sad, then it’s a pretty good indication that those things have something to do with each other. In that case, you would do well to look up snakes in a dream interpretation dictionary and to think about what your personal feelings about snakes are and how they relate to the dreams you’ve had that include them.

The more you think on what the dreams mean and what the symbols within them could mean, the more likely you are to uncover what your dreams are trying to tell you. This is especially important if you are having dreams with negative emotions often that you would like to conquer by dealing with them.

The second reason to look back through recurring themes in your dreams is to identify what is known as dream signs. Dream signs are recurring symbols in your dreams that can be used to identify that you are dreaming more easily. This can be used to more effectively lucid dream, which is ultimately where we believe the journey of working with your dreams will lead most people.

Time to Explore Your Dream World!

Now you know how to dream journal properly and why you should strive to remember more of your dreams. If you’re interested in learning to lucid dream, this article also functions as the first in a six part series that will help you learn to lucid dream in the way that we believe will be the easiest and most successful for most people. Now get out there and start dreaming!