The Benefits of Keeping A Dream Journal

The first place to start when embarking upon Dreamwork (integrating your dream life into your spiritual practice) is to develop your dream recall. If you can't remember your dreams you won't have much to work with. Also, there is little sense in trying to develop dream lucidity (the ability to recognize when you are in the dream state and to gain a greater level of control over the experience) if you aren't going to remember it. Greater dream recall in itself helps develop lucidity. It does this by breaking down the natural memory barrier between your waking state and dreaming state. When you develop your ability to remember your dreams while waking, you are simultaneously developing your ability to remember your waking life while dreaming.

There are a number of things you can do to improve your dream recall. The foundational technique is to record all the dreams which you remember. Not only does this create an excellent companion to your personal and magical journals (if you keep them), it also sends the message to your unconscious mind that remembering dreams is important. If you keep this practice up, you will find yourself remembering more and more dreams. I've gone through periods where I would remember an average of 5 dreams every night. Sometimes I would remember up to 8 or 9 dreams in just one normal night of sleeping. This can be a lot of writing but the record/journal doesn't need to be written out. I've found it useful to keep a voice recorder by the bed and dictate my dreams upon awakening. This is especially helpful when you wake up in the middle of the night and don't feel like turning on the lights. I have even reviewed these tapes upon awakening and found records of dreams that I didn't remember experiencing or describing. A lot of voice recorders available now allow you to transfer the audio files to your computer, which can then be archived on a physical DVD or other data storage device.

There are many other benefits to having a dream journal beyond improving your recall. It can be used to compile a list of your most frequently experienced dream symbols (events, characters, settings, etc...) The items on this list can be used as triggers for lucidity. You simply train yourself to question your state ("Am I dreaming right now?") whenever you encounter any of the items on the list. You are eventually going to do this while encountering the item within a dream. At first you may conclude that you are not dreaming but with practice and especially with sincere questioning of your state you will "awaken" (gain lucidity) within your dreams.

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