with some awareness of irony as i enter month 4 of my latest creative block, i thought i should write a little post about dream journals, my preferred tool for finding ideas. the practice of dream journaling feels enriching in the same way that making art feels enriching, and the best part is your brain does most of the work without any conscious effort. i’m not going to get into psychoanalysis or dream interpretation in this post, as that’s a more open-ended and personal process. you are free to practice on me if you want, as nearly all my dream recordings are publicly available.
dreams produce the kinds of ideas and imagery that are nearly impossible for the conscious mind to generate unassisted, and by utilizing them in your art you are able to cultivate a style that is striking, personal, and unique. by paying attention to the contents of a dream, you are filling novel corners of your perceptual and thematic libraries, the places we look first when deciding on the form and content of an artwork. even as I currently struggle to make anything, dream journaling provides me an opportunity to bank ideas for later, a strategy that has worked out for me in the past; see: this game, directly inspired by one of my dreams and a work i consider among my best.
dream journaling is a simple practice that is almost self explanatory: have dreams while you sleep, and record your memory of them when you wake up. there are of course several complicating factors and choices to make that prevent people from starting. i have gone through long periods of inactivity myself. here are the common blockers:
“i wish i could do it but i never have dreams”
rejoice! all human beings on the planet (and most other animal species) have dreams every day. they just happen to be easier or harder for some people to access. the most obvious thing to take care of is your sleep hygiene. importantly, you need to make sure you’re getting enough sleep in the first place. sleep cycles occur in intervals of roughly 90 minutes. the most accessible dreams are had during REM sleep, which occurs at the end of a cycle, and the dreams you’ll remember are the ones that occur right before you wake. for many people, if they have a morning alarm, their body will restructure its sleep patterns so that they wake up consistently a little before their alarm actually goes off. the ideal scenario is that you get an appropriate amount of sleep (roughly 7-8 hours for most adults), and that you will be ending your last cycle, in REM sleep, right before your alarm goes off. this will maximize the chance you have a dream you remember, and is optimal for your health too—there is evidence to suggest that interruptions during deep sleep can be harmful.
there are some medications and drugs (weed) that suppress dream recall. it’s usually still possible if you make an effort to remember, though, because you are absolutely still dreaming every night. you can also take certain medications or supplements to improve recall. melatonin is an obvious one. just don’t take more than 0.1mg or you’ll actively disrupt your sleep.
don’t be discouraged if you don’t remember them frequently. if you cast your line you’ll eventually catch one. and as you start to remember your dreams, you’ll start to remember them more frequently and vividly.
“i have dreams I’d rather not remember”
there are different solutions for this, depending on what you mean. lots of dreams are nightmares. if you’re just worried about having dreams where bad things happen, i suggest you push through this—not only are nightmares always full of interesting details, they can also be useful for introspection and working through difficult feelings and problems. i find nightmares more cathartic than dreams that just provide wish fulfillment, because one ends in relief and the other in disappointment.
conversely, if your dreams are so severely unpleasant that they disrupt your quality of life and their effects on you persist when awake, then it’s time to see a professional.
“my dreams are just boring”
no they aren’t. you think they are boring because when you’re dreaming, dream logic is mundane. in the short period after waking, you’re still half operating under this logic, and by the time you forget, you’re only left with the feeling of the dream and that it was apparently boring. waking up and immediately recording what you dreamed has a twofold effect of bringing you into waking lucidity more quickly and allowing that fucked up dream logic to be put into context by real life. once you start recording, you’ll notice that you start to remember more about your dream, and further back—often the further you go, the weirder it gets. it’s not unusual for me to start at the end of my dream and prepend my recording with more and more details i remember about what came before. this makes sense, because typically we remember most what occurred in our dreams just before waking up. when trying to recall a dream to someone else, i think we go through this process without even realizing it.
“i want to do it but by morning i always forget”
this is going to sound silly, but it works for practiced lucid-dreamers and it works for me: verbally affirm that you are going to journal in the morning. plant the idea in your head. you don’t have to fret about it. just remind yourself as you go to sleep about your plan to log in the morning. if you’ve set up your environment to make journaling the natural thing to do, you are more likely to eventually get started in the first place.
“i don’t want to write a bunch down the moment i wake up”
well, it’s inevitable that you will have to put in a little work. what I’ve found is that it rarely takes very much writing to conjure the memory of a dream. i tend to focus on writing down the actual events and objects in a dream, because my memory will automatically fill in the details, vibes and emotions i felt when i was in it. however, it should be said that the more minimal you get, the more likely it is you won’t be able to remember it later. as of writing, there are only a few (maybe 3-4 out of 118) entries in my dream log that I cannot remember, and many of them are years old.
you don’t actually have to write either. a voice memo works just as well for many people. i used to use a physical notebook, but now i just type them in a notes app on my phone, sometimes with speech-to-text. you could even draw a scene from your dreams. a dream journal isn’t necessarily supposed to be a highly detailed log of written events, because the actual entries themselves aren’t fully useful on their own—the memory they evoke is what creates a lasting impact. do whatever is easiest to you. set up your environment to make it as easy as possible. i open up the app i use before going to bed and place the phone next to my pillow, so that it’s already there and ready when i wake up.
however, if you find you still just don’t enjoy doing it or get much out of it even after trying different things, then maybe you should just stop trying and move on. not everything is for everyone.