I have kept a dream journal since 3 October 2023, which is three years this month, and the honest thing to say first is that most dream journals end up as a list of strange scenes that nobody ever reads again. The dream goes in, the notebook closes, and the whole point of the exercise, which is to find out what the dream was for, never happens.
So this is a guide to the other kind of dream journal, the kind where you write the dream down, then write down what each image means to you, and only then try to work out what the dream was trying to say. That second step is the one the paperback dictionaries skip, and it is the one that provides the most value.
Why a dictionary cannot keep your journal for you
A dream symbol dictionary will tell you that snakes represent transformation and water means your emotions. I do not think that is wrong exactly, it gets you in the right ballpark, but for me the framing is backwards. A fixed symbol dictionary treats a dream image like a word in a foreign language. You look it up and you get the translation.
A dream image behaves more like a name than a word. If I tell you my mother’s name, a dictionary is useless to you, because the meaning sits in the relationship.
Here is the example that convinced me. I dreamt of a lion. Normally I associate lions with danger, regality, confidence and pride. But a few days before, I had finished Boyd Varty’s book The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, in which the author compares tracking a lion to chasing your life goals. So the lion in my dream, looked at through my own lens of association, was about chasing my goals. No dictionary on earth could have told me that, because the meaning was never in the lion itself but in what the lion had been doing in my life that week.
This is exactly why Jung was wary of universal symbol keys, even though he spent his whole career studying archetypal imagery. In Man and His Symbols he put it bluntly:
“It is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol.”
C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (1964)
Archetypes are real and they recur across cultures, but in dreams they arrive dressed in the specific, personal material of the dreamer’s own life. Each symbol, each person in waking life even, is simply a jumble of archetypes dressed up in drag. Your journal is the only place that material gets written down, and I think that is why it matters more than any dictionary ever could.
Step one. Remember the dream in the first place
Most people tell me they do not dream, and what they mean is that they do not remember. There are three things changed dream recall for me.
Set an intention before sleep. A simple phrase like “I will remember my dreams”, said as you turn the light off, is very effective in preparing your mind to remember.
Keep the recorder within reach. For me that is the notes app on my phone, or a voice recording app that will transcribe my sleepy mumblings into words, or my own app DreamOS, which has a dictation feature built in. A notebook and pen on the bedside table does the same job for people who prefer paper.
Wake gently. Upon waking, remain still with your eyes closed and let your mind drift back to the dream. Recall it from start to finish and then capture it, because the moment you sit up and reach for the day, the dream goes, and it goes fast, so catch it while you are still lying down.
Another thing I have found that is effective is reading a bit of fiction before bed. It primes the mind with story and seems to produce more vivid dreams that are easier to hold onto in the morning.
Step two. Write it down before you understand it
Get the dream down in the first person, exactly as you dreamt it, before you think about any of it. What I make sure goes in, and why it matters later, is below.
| Write down | Why it matters later |
|---|---|
| The setting | It tells you which part of your inner world the dream is happening in. A childhood house and an alpine lake are not the same place |
| Every figure, named or not | The strangers matter most. Someone your age and sex that you do not recognise is worth a second look |
| What you felt, in the dream and on waking | The feeling is the fine detail a dictionary never has |
| Where the dream stopped | The place it stopped is often the place the associations get interesting |
| The boring bits | The date, and a line or two about what happened the day before. Patterns show up here months later |
Do not tidy it up or try to make it make sense, that bit comes later.
Step three. Ask what each symbol means to you, then look at your life
This is the method I use, which comes from Robert A. Johnson’s book Inner Work. It has four steps.
Associations. Take each symbol and write down the first four or five things that come to mind. The best ones are the ones that come straight away, and the extra juicy ones are the ones you judge yourself for thinking, or disregard at once for whatever reason. Those are the gold dust. Every so often one association clicks with the symbol, a feeling that it could not be anything else but that. When you get the click, keep that one and let the others go.
Inner dynamics. Now look at the associations next to your life as it is this week. Say you dreamt you were climbing a steep, familiar mountain and kept slipping. Your associations for the mountain might be a family holiday, childhood, safety. Your associations for slipping might be falling, failure, unstable. Set those beside the fact that you have been finding it an uphill battle to ring your family lately, and the dream starts to speak. Dreams love that kind of phrase, by the way. They take the figure of speech you use in daylight and stage it.
Interpretation. Only now do you write what you think the dream was saying. Keep it loose. There are often several meanings in one dream, just as one symbol can carry several at once, so instead of one solid instruction the dream is better seen as a flavour that can inspire action. It is good practice to write your own interpretation before you let anything or anyone else offer theirs.
Ritual. A small act in waking life that nods to the dream. The dreamer on the mountain might ring their mother. A ritual of mine is writing the dream out again in cinematic detail and letting my imagination go wild on the scene. I might light a candle for a dream figure, go for a cold swim, or write a letter to someone who only exists in the dream space. A ritual is a conscious hat tip towards the unconscious, and in my experience it sets off chain reactions that are stranger than you would expect. The unconscious tends to respond better to a ritual you invented under your own steam than one handed to you.
Step four. Keep it somewhere the patterns can show
A single dream is a letter, but a year of them is a correspondence, and that is where the journal earns its keep. I keep mine in a database with a column for each of the steps above, plus tags for the symbols, so that when the same dog turns up in your dreams for the 3rd year running you can see every dream it has been in. A paper journal with an index page at the back does the same thing more slowly.
Over months what you start to see is less a meaning than a movement. Early on, my own dreams were full of dark cupboards, fights with strangers and underground trials. Later came caves and free diving, then white laundry, churches and pilgrimages. Nobody could have read that arc from one night, and I certainly could not have, because it only shows when the nights are kept together.
The free guide
The Dream Tracking Guide is the version of all this that I give away. It has the four steps written out, the tips for remembering, the mountain example worked through from first association to ritual, and the handful of symbols that reliably turn up in everyone’s dreams, so you have somewhere to start without a dictionary. It works with nothing more than a notebook, and it is the same method DreamOS holds for you if you would rather have the structure held.
Get The Dream Tracking Guide, free
When the journal is full and you want it to remember
The one thing a notebook cannot do is remember for you. It will not notice that this is the 4th lake this year, or that the stranger from March is back. That is what I built DreamOS to do. You have a vast community inside you, and every night they stage a play, and DreamOS is where you finally listen to them. It asks you who each of them is and what they mean to you before it says a word, because you are the only one who has ever met them, and then it remembers, so that each dream builds on the ones before, and the Mind Codex, a living map of everyone who has appeared, fills in one dream at a time.
DreamOS opens on 17 November, Sydney time. Join the early circle, it’s free to begin, and bring your journal with you.
Questions people ask
What does my dream mean? I cannot tell you, and I would be wary of anyone who says they can from a one line description. What I can tell you is how to find out. Write the dream down, write your own first association for each image, then look at where those associations touch your life this week. Nine times out of ten the first answer that comes up is more accurate than anything a dictionary will give you, because it is the only version of the answer that is actually about you.
How long should a dream journal entry be? As long as the dream. Some of mine are three lines, some run to a page. The associations and inner dynamics usually end up longer than the dream itself, and that is the right way round.
Is there a dream journal template? Not a template, on purpose, but the structure is in The Dream Tracking Guide and you can draw it on any page. Give each dream a heading for the raw dream, the day before, the symbols, your associations, the inner dynamics, your interpretation, the ritual and how charged it felt. A notebook with those eight headings is the whole template.
Should I use a dream dictionary at all? Use it last, if at all, and never first. Try this. Take any dream you have had and look up its main symbol in three different dictionaries. You will get three different answers, and none of them will feel like they are about your dream. Then give the symbol a minute on your own and notice which of the two feels like it is about your dream.
Is dream journalling a kind of therapy? No. It is a way of listening to yourself, and it sits alongside whatever else you do for your health, not instead of it. If a dream leaves a feeling that is heavy or will not shift, talk to a doctor or therapist too.