Dream journaling...Do you have some tips for dream journal?

Dream journal is a tool. And a pretty good one. Mine is filled with text. And there are also some descriptive pictures every now and then. I added also the exact day to the journal recently and added also the dream ID, which describes the exact order in which the dreams occured. Still i feel, there could be much, much more done.

Now.. Why i started this thread:

1. My journal entries are getting too long. As i am remembering more and more... And if you have some tips how to make it shorter... Lets share.

2. I came to an idea... What if we gave some additional info iinto a journal entry, which will describe it somehow. It could be lucidity level description or some sign of dream type {nightmare, lucid dream, oob, ....}. We could also monitor which methods induced this dream.... This could help when we choose the most effective method for us...

3. There is not much written about recall. And from my opinion. Recall is the most important aspect in dreaming and LD. I plan to create some collaborative project about Lucid dreaming starting with recall chapter. This thread could help to build subchapter... Tips and tricks for dream journal..


And now.. About you.. How are your journals? What tips would you give us?

Hmm..I'm not sure I follow everything you've proposed but I suppose I'll tell you what I do...

I keep a notepad and pen next to my bed, clearly dated and underlined so I can wake at any point, jot whatever I recall, usually with hardly any detail...If something strange happened..say, I woke in SP or felt vibrations as I woke or felt "entities" in the room, i might jot "Scary SP" on the side.. or "low awareness" if I felt I was questioning the dream reality a little, but not quite lucid. If there was something out of the ordinary I did before going to sleep, I might jot "cup of coffee" or "excercise and shower" or "b6/melatonin etc." or "late sleep start" if I was up till 3 or 4..

To sum up, I find the best thing to do is to keep the pad handy, scribble a note or two to remind you of key points.. "My house" "had sister" "flew off roof" and perhaps another note to remind you of sleep happenings or techniques either before or after the dream "woke in sp" and expand on it later...I usually write rough notes like this and then record them on DV in digital form...

Sorry, I rambled, but hope i helped.. i'm interested in this as well, not a bad idea:)

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Originally Posted by bro

Hmm..I'm not sure I follow everything you've proposed but I suppose I'll tell you what I do...

I keep a notepad and pen next to my bed, clearly dated and underlined so I can wake at any point, jot whatever I recall, usually with hardly any detail...If something strange happened..say, I woke in SP or felt vibrations as I woke or felt "entities" in the room, i might jot "Scary SP" on the side.. or "low awareness" if I felt I was questioning the dream reality a little, but not quite lucid. If there was something out of the ordinary I did before going to sleep, I might jot "cup of coffee" or "excercise and shower" or "b6/melatonin etc." or "late sleep start" if I was up till 3 or 4..

To sum up, I find the best thing to do is to keep the pad handy, scribble a note or two to remind you of key points.. "My house" "had sister" "flew off roof" and perhaps another note to remind you of sleep happenings or techniques either before or after the dream "woke in sp" and expand on it later...I usually write rough notes like this and then record them on DV in digital form...

Sorry, I rambled, but hope i helped.. i'm interested in this as well, not a bad idea:)

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Thanx. You didnt rumble. Thats exactly what it should be about. So you write your journal brief. There is one thing what could help.. Which ideas do you pinpoint to note? Are they somehow special? Strong ideas? How do you reconstruct the plot then?

I keep a small note pad and pen next to my bed. Everytime I wake up during the night (often 4 or more times) I think "did I dream?" I don't even sit up to write. I just lay there and scrawl. I've gotten pretty good at reading my sleepy handwriting. I write down some notes. If the dream isn't well remembered I write whatever I can remember. Detaled dreams get longer notes. I include where I was, who I was with, names (because I forget these first), important plot points, and if I was lucid or not. Sometimes I will do short descritions of places. The point is for me to be able to read the notes and remember the dream. Then I write a long entry for each dream. Some will be less than half of a handwritten page. Others are more than 10 pages long. I draw pictures of the people and places (just quick sketches). Usually it takes me at least an hour to do my dream journal each day. I don't mind, because I am carefully tracking several aspects of my dreams and all the detail is necessary for my own purposes.

At the end of each entry for the day I total up how many (if any) lucids I had, and what type they were. If I also did any dream tricks or magic I note that as well. I also write down the goal I made for my dreams before I went to sleep.

As for keeping your entries short, I would recomend deciding what aspect of dreaming is most important to you (details, plot points, dream tricks, DS, whatever) and focusing your dream journal on only those aspects that are of interest. Write summaries, not blow-by-blow descriptions.

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I keep a small note pad and pen next to my bed. Everytime I wake up during the night (often 4 or more times) I think "did I dream?" I don't even sit up to write. I just lay there and scrawl. I've gotten pretty good at reading my sleepy handwriting. I write down some notes. If the dream isn't well remembered I write whatever I can remember. Detaled dreams get longer notes. I include where I was, who I was with, names (because I forget these first), important plot points, and if I was lucid or not. Sometimes I will do short descritions of places. The point is for me to be able to read the notes and remember the dream. Then I write a long entry for each dream. Some will be less than half of a handwritten page. Others are more than 10 pages long. I draw pictures of the people and places (just quick sketches). Usually it takes me at least an hour to do my dream journal each day. I don't mind, because I am carefully tracking several aspects of my dreams and all the detail is necessary for my own purposes.

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Yeah. I am trying to write notes when I am in bed, not longer stories. Of course I was writing them, when I was starting to remember dreams, but now. As more details and dream fragments arise, I have no longer time at night. So i am writing just notes. These notes are like so:

• Entering the world -north pole - large crystal
  
• Flying test
  
• Three witches
• Diamond for good witch {as their hearth}
• .....

I decorate notes with two long vertical lines || at the left of the list list so i know these are just a notes.

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At the end of each entry for the day I total up how many (if any) lucids I had, and what type they were. If I also did any dream tricks or magic I note that as well. I also write down the goal I made for my dreams before I went to sleep.

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As for my approach. I make evidence for time when I get asleep and time when I awake. I am making a research on my own called {Efficient journal writing} and i created two symbols for this purpose.
Fall asleep time symbol {like a small bed}:
http://adraw.yweb.sk/f.jpg

Wake up time symbol {like a small bed with upwards pointing arrow}:
http://adraw.yweb.sk/w.jpg

I and II refers to dreams which i remembered when waking up. Often it happens that while writing my dream journal entry i find out that some other dream idea came into my head. Then i use:

// note

This is used to notify me, that it is not a part of actuall dream and should be considered later. Pretty handy if you are doing longer posts and dont want to forget key workds.

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As for keeping your entries short, I would recomend deciding what aspect of dreaming is most important to you (details, plot points, dream tricks, DS, whatever) and focusing your dream journal on only those aspects that are of interest. Write summaries, not blow-by-blow descriptions.

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Yes. I am planning to find good journal technique to make it all simple and short. This includes the keywords i mentioned. Their use is pretty simple and fast.

Thank you for this post. i would like to move this topic this way.

My tip is to keep the dream journal as simple as possible, it shouldn't become a chore keeping a dream journal, but something that you WANT to do. I know a lot of people on this forum write their journal entries on-line, but I prefer actually writing them in my booklet, it seems more personal to me for some reason. I date each entry and give it a title, then write down the dream using present tense.

I was wondering. Why is the present tense so important. It somehow pushes me towards writing it in past tense. Does it help with recall?

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Originally Posted by adraw

I was wondering. Why is the present tense so important. It somehow pushes me towards writing it in past tense. Does it help with recall?

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I usually write my DJ entries in past tense. If I write them in present tense I tend to forget lot of things I don't know why... :S

Hey i don't know if any of this was already said but i will say it anyway. Sorry if there are going to be like a thousand typos, i am in school (free period, not class) and i am sort of rushed.
I like this idea because when i focus on recall i do really well but when i focus on LDing i lose recall? I am sort of having both a dryspell in recall and LDs right now (even though i don't have many LDs to start with) but i want to focus on dreaming more specifically recall because i have been preoccupied with school (senior year and college) so i have lost recall but i am trying hard to get back again and it isn't easy, waking up and spending 10 minutes trying to remeber but nothing is there! GRRRR..
A SUGGUESTION FOR SHORTER ENTRIES

Spoiler for It is sort of a long explantion.:

Also a little dream jornal tip that i noticed and started using. If you can legitametley remember a dream and think about the details they usually associate with the bigger picture. For example, the other day i had a dream where i wrote down this: " I entered the gym and saw a group dancing and playing a game, they all dropped when they saw me, i laughed and soon after exited the gym" It sounds sort of bland, like there were few details involed but when i re-read the dream that single sentence and conjure up so many more memories, for example, here is all i could tell you about it: " I entered the gym and i saw the group of girls that i was hanging out with earlier in my dorm room, we were playing a game where we tried to dance for as long as possilble before someone can come up and touch you, when you think they are getting too close you drop to the floor. The girls were about 30 or 40 feet away and I casually approached the group, curious of their mannorisms. One of the girls notices me and shouted out to everyone that i was approaching and the all dropped like bricks, laughing. Immediatly at that moment i remembered that earlier (in the dream) we were playing that game. I was surprised that they were still playing that game. I told them i am not playing anymore and I let them know i had no intentions of touching them and getting them out of the game. There was lots of laughter, we were all having fun. I walked back to the exit of the gym and entered the hallway." Basically what i mean is that, me personally, can associate a lot of details to one scene and i skip over the details i know i will remember next time i read the entry. I don't know if you do or don't do that because i think it's kind of common sence. Just be sure to really think about the details of the dream as your write it down and write down the details that are importaint or you think you wont remember.

TL;DR: Try to associate smaller details to bigger aspects of the dream, so you will remember them when reading and don't have to write them down.

I was just about to start a thread on the same topic until I saw this one. I also typed out a pretty hefty reply, but then realised that mazillion summed up almost exactly what I was going to say.

I think the best thing’s to rely on are schemas (I hope this is the correct term!). These are basically things which trigger a network of memories in the brain. It’s a bit like word association, when I type the word “foot”, many of you will think “ball” because the neurons in your brain have literally forged a stronger pathway due to the amount of times you make this link. It’s the same with stereotypes, when somebody sees dreadlocks they (sometimes) think hippy. The examples are endless.

Therefore I think it’s a brilliant idea to separate dream notes from your dream journal. If, in the night, you write down the general plot of the dream, including key aspects such as location, characters and main events, the rest of your brain can fill in the gaps in the morning. How many times have you told a story to a friend, then at one point, had your memory triggered because you missed out an earlier detail? This should hopefully work in the same way.

In the morning I’d propose that you take 10 minutes and then read these notes and write out every single detail that you can remember. This is pretty self-explanatory I hope; the more information you extract from your dreams now, the more reliable your dream recall will be in the future. Furthermore I think this could potentially leave room for enhancing the vividness of your dreams in the future as your mind could be searching for more and more detail.

I think an important thing to do is not write/type the final draft of your dream journal in the morning. I guarantee that every one of you has, at some point, been walking down the street and suddenly remembered an extra aspect of a dream from the previous night, perhaps even a new dream entirely. Hopefully all of you will be able to add in at least a couple more details by doing this.

My final tip would be to recreate the conditions of your dream as much as possible. If any of you are familiar with police work, you may have heard of Cognitive Interview. This technique aims to maximise the extent of witness memory when trying to make a case. One of the important factors in this is recreation of event conditions. Although this can’t be achieved completely with dreams, you can go to certain lengths to do this. For example I listened to a song that I heard in my dream last night, and managed to retrieve extra details from my memory due to association. One technique Cognitive Interviews use is to imagine the event from a different viewpoint. In the police force this has been shown to extract 47-63% more information than traditional interview methods with 85% accuracy rates.

If any of you are interested, I think Cognitive Interviewing will have a lot of useful secrets to help maximise your dream recall. This is all of course if you have the time to try out these techniques. I don’t expect that all of you are willing to go to such extents, and I’m not expecting it to work for 100% of people. However I really recommend that you give it a shot. The only thing it will take from you is perhaps 15 minutes of your day.


Sorry for the wall of text, but I'd be really interested in collaborating on a DJ project. I know my dreaming experience is limited but I know quite a lot about memory.

Please Discuss :)