Does journaling your dreams sound interesting and useful, but there’s no free time in your action-packed day?
Just two to five minutes: Dream journaling can take as little as two minutes after you wake up.
You don’t have to fully journal every single dream to benefit from dream journaling. Journal the big ones. The intriguing ones. The really weird ones. The ones that seem to be important or remarkably interesting.
For those dreams, make some quick notes when you wake up or make a quick recording about it on your phone. Later, go back and write the dream down fully. It doesn’t have to take a long time.
Why this is true
When it comes to dream interpretation, most of the heavy lifting comes during the day when you reflect on the different aspects of the dream means to you. You don’t necessarily have to write down each symbol along with an interpretation (see: three-step dream interpretation).
The disadvantage here is you’ll sometimes have a dream that seems to be an everyday kind of dream, one of those that comes directly from your life and illustrates an aspect of it. You might assume something that isn’t necessarily true about its import.
There’s always a reason for the dream. What you have to do is understand why this dream? Why now?
After reading thousands of different people’s dreams, it seems if you give your subconscious a chance to be heard, it’s going to take it. Your conscious mind is in control. If you adopt this way of dream journaling, your subconscious can easily add a feature to your dream that says, “Pay attention to this!” Something that makes the dream weird and interesting. Will it do it is a whole other question.
It’s important to jot some notes about the dream down on an index card and or a scrap piece of paper. It’s an important habit to develop. That’s how you develop the give and take that allows you to get the greatest results from the type of meditation that dream journaling is.
It turns life into a classroom. And like any classroom, sometimes you don’t fully understand the lesson the first time it’s presented. Some lessons are more complicated than others. When you encounter a lesson like that, you’ve got to go back and try to understand it in a new way. You’ve got to look at the material again, maybe look at a step you’ve missed. That’s the main reason dream journaling is a powerful practice.
Two minutes. Everyone has at least two minutes in their day.
Also on the blog:
James Cobb RN, MSN is the founder of the Dream Recovery System, a top sleep and dream journaling website.
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