Thread: Dream journal vs. Dream reviewing?

You don't need to write them down when you wake up in the middle of the night. What people usually do (including me) is write down some tags, and when you want to write them you just have to look at your tags.

I see what you mean (and if you don't like to write down your dreams in a journal, that's fine; you should use the methods that work best for you as there's no point in forcing yourself to do it if you hate it and don't find it useful) but personally love to write down my dreams. One reason being that I hate forgetting my dreams, even after a few days... I'd much rather write them down so that, whenever I want to remember the vivid images and emotions of the dream again, I can just look at the entry and it'll be "real" inside my head again. I like to think a lot about my dreams and to use them for creative things, too, as well as to look back in time and see how my dreams reflected certain things at a certain point in my life -- so it's useful to have them documented. Plus for me there's just something about the act of writing the dream down (transferring it from one reality to another) that I'd hate to lose. I also find that whilst writing them I often begin to remember twists and details that just reviewing didn't help me bring back.

However, I don't usually write my dreams down when I wake in the middle of the night either. Then I usually review (and write down what I remember later in the day) or just write very brief notes on them so that they'll stick in my memory and I can write them in more detail later.