Thread: Should I use my dream journal or my computer?

Some feel that handwriting is best for burning the dreams into your memory. Another benefit to paper is that it's a lot more robust to the technological glitches that plague our society these days. On the other hand, it's a lot slower, and I find writing for long periods painful (not to mention I don't have particularly good furniture or lighting for it, making it even worse on my body). Writing it on the computer has a lot of benefits, such as taking vastly less time and making it easier to search for things.

Ultimately, it's up to you, but my personal compromise has been this: I use a voice recorder to record rough notes about everything I remember upon each awakening. This can be done in the dark, takes barely a few minutes, and I then get back to sleep quickly. Then, when I get up, I go through the voice notes and type them as formal entries on my DJ which I keep on the computer. This way, I go through every dream in my mind at least twice, which helps solidify the events in my memory. I haven't regretted this approach, and my recall is just fine. But I would also recommend going back and rereading your DJ from time to time. I went nearly a decade without ever reading my DJ, then when I finally read it I realized I had forgotten most of what I had written about, making it almost feel like I was reading someone else's DJ in a way!

Originally Posted by ARandomViewer

I have one more question. This site will die one day (maybe not) like most other sites then what about my DJ will all of that be lost or will I be able to print it out or something?

This is a good question and is one thing that always makes me a bit wary and skeptical of Web- and cloud-based services. I don't use Dream Views's DJ system, so I'm not familiar with what it offers, but unless it has an easy export option to export the entire DJ in a single download to something you can easily open on your computer without the aid of the Internet, I would be worried. Personally, I prefer to manage my own data. I have a set of self-written software scripts that take my DJ and create a nicely-organized, custom-tailored set of HTML pages I can comfortably browse and navigate in a browser, but all of the DJ content they read from is contained in nothing more than a plain text file—something that virtually any text editor on any computer and OS on the planet can open, even if it's just Windows Notepad. I use a little HTML and some other special syntax, but it's sparse and designed to still be reasonably human-legible on its own, not much worse than reading raw posts with BBCode on forums. The fancy scripts and such are just extra stuff; if they somehow just disappeared or stopped working someday, my raw DJ content would still be safe and readable. If I really wanted to, I could just print the entire thing out on paper for safekeeping (though the cost might be somewhat prohibitive at nearly 2 million words and growing!). And then I keep it backed up by regularly copying it (and all my other computer files) to more than one other storage device on a regular basis and check them out from time to time to make sure they still work.

Hope that didn't get too technical. Basically, I just wanted to point out that you're right for thinking about the security of your data when considering any kind of computer system, especially online services. Too many people don't think of it until it's too late. As a general rule, simpler is safer, so if you write on the computer, I recommend using the simplest software possible that gets the job done.

Hmmm thank you I will remember this. But I don't know I'm kind of thinking Of first writing in my first DJ I like the "it runs through my mind" part than later in the day I will put it in the computer. Sounds nice.