I've always written, and continue to write, my DJ entries in past tense, for the same reason I write events that have already occurred in my waking-life journals/diaries in past tense: Because it simply makes logical sense. Any time you're retelling an event that you witnessed, you're normally going to use the past tense.
But an even more important reason I stick with past tense in my DJ is because writing everything in the present tense can result in a lot of confusing ambiguity. I frequently need to make references to current waking-life events in explaining the content of my dreams, since there is a significant relation between the two. Likewise, I need to make it clear whether the thoughts and feelings I'm describing were those that happened during the dream or are ones I have at the moment, in waking life. Simply using past tense for the former and present tense for the latter is usually sufficient to make this distinguishable, and I don't have to put a lot of conscious effort into it, as I use language this way intuitively. If I were writing everything in present tense, it'd be much more tricky to set them apart, and I'd have to be very careful to explicitly explain what realm I'm referring to every time. Apart from this potentially resulting in excessive verbosity, I could easily forget to do so, leaving me wondering upon a future reading exactly what I meant. Dreams are already difficult enough to remember and explain in many cases that the last thing I need is to needlessly introduce an even greater chance of not being sure in the future of what I meant to say originally.
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