DJs can be rather tedious, I agree. But I've found the results worth it. The enjoyment I get from going back and reading about the cool things I did motivates me to keep journaling. The same thing is true of my waking-life journal. It's fun to read about the nostalgic things I did before, but I'm always disappointed when I come across sections where I was lazy and barely wrote anything and therefore no longer remember clearly what happened. So I do it with the realization that putting in a little extra effort now, even if I don't completely feel like it, will make me happier later.
Even then, I got to a point where I had massive dream recall every night, which was cool, but the time it took writing still got to be a bit too much. So I began to compromise a bit, mainly focusing on the most interesting and significant dreams, just enough to strike a reasonable balance between the time it takes and the quality of the entries.
Some have recommend techniques like “tagging” (I think it's called?) and such, where one just writes down short words and phrases about the dreams to help trigger their memory, without having to write about the whole dream. But I've heard others say that they ran into the problem of those brief notes becoming meaningless and useless to them years later after they've finally forgotten the dream. I recently went nearly ten years of keeping a DJ but never reading it, and when I finally did, I realized that I no longer recognized a large number of the dreams I wrote about. But at least I wrote about them in full and they were there. So I've never used such techniques; I've decided I'd rather go through the trouble to write them out in full, and also try to read over my DJ more often (that's why I'm going through the trouble, after all). You reap what you sow.
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