You are giving your writing muscles a workout, and you’ll find it tones up your whole system.
Writer and creativity coach Robin O’Neal Kissel shares this account of what keeping a dream journal has meant for her:
I have found the practice of journaling my dreams has significantly impacted the way in which I write about waking reality. As I write a night dream as a story, it calls on me to take my waking writer’s mind back into the world of the dream on a quest to capture the imagery, the emotion, the sequence… the very texture of the dream experience. In writing a dream narrative, I strive to honor fully the depth of the experience of my dream, owning it and making it real with words.
I have gained much as a dreamer via this process, because that which is honored and owned multiplies and expands, blooming in the nurturing, thriving with attention. I have also gained much as a writer. I approach the act of journaling my daily events as if they, too, are a dream — the dream that happens on this side of my consciousness. I explore the events of my waking life with an eye to capturing the imagery, emotion, sequence, and texture, telling it as a story, seeking to comprehend symbolism and synchronicity, just as I would a dream. In both instances, I take myself back into the scene unfolding and narrate in the present tense — the act of writing in present tense requires that I be fully present to the story unfolding. Often, recounting the experience this way is tantamount to “reentry,” and I’m astounded by the new comprehension or creative stirrings of forward momentum that transpire within, and because of, the process itself.
Six Deeper Games to Play with Your Secret Book
Journaling is a practice, and as in any true practice, you have to earn the right of admission to the more advanced levels. Here are six deeper games to play with your journal when you’ve been journaling for at least one year.
Bibliomancy
Bibliomancy is the fancy name for opening a book at random to get guidance on a theme or simply a guide to the quality and content of the day. In Western countries, over the centuries the Bible has been the hands-down favorite for use as a book oracle. Abraham Lincoln used to open his family Bible — the one on which Barack Obama took his oath of office — to get a message for the day or a second opinion on the meaning of a dream.
I enjoy doing bibliomancy with my old journals. One Christmas Eve, after learning that a friend had developed a serious illness and was having other major troubles in her life, I reached blindly into a shelf of more than thirty old travel journals, grabbed one without looking at the date, and opened it at random. I found myself looking at a short dream report from five years earlier. The dream was about my friend. It stated that she had “accepted purgatory for a year. This purgatory is a room in her home that opens into the same realm.” I shared this report with my friend, and we began to work with the meaning of acceptance and of purgatory. Our mutual exploration provided assurance that “this too shall pass,” and that a year in “purgatory” would result in healing and new growth, as proved to be the case.
Compare Your Dream Self to Your Waking Self
Are you running away from something in your dreams? Ask yourself when you tend to run away from something — a person, an issue, a necessary conversation — in regular life.
Does your dream self have supernormal powers? Can she fly or knock villains down like ninepins? If so, then ask yourself where you might be able to draw on her courage and powers in the rest of your life.
Comparing the behavior of the dream self and that of the waking self is highly instructive. We may also find that bringing gifts and qualities from one realm into the other can be tremendously healing and empowering. My waking self may be able to bring courage — the determination to brave up to a challenge — to a dream self that is frightened or frozen.
My dream self who is fluent in another language, or can breathe underwater, may be able to give me the power to expand my vocabulary of understanding or to operate with ease in a new environment.
Dialogue with Your Other Selves
Sit down with your journal and imagine yourself talking to a character from one of your dreams. Since everything is alive in dreams, you can ask anything from a dream — a horse, a house, an eighteen-wheeler — to talk to you. You can call up every character and element from a dream and ask them to explain themselves in turn, if you like.
Start out with a question like “Who are you?” or “What are you doing in my dream?”
Move on to a question like “What can you tell me?”
Be ready to be surprised! You may find you are interviewing sides of yourself you never knew were part of your family of personality aspects. You may find you are talking to a departed loved one, or an ancestor, or the guy who owned the house fifty years ago. You may even encounter a dream character who tells you: “I am dreaming you. You are in my dream.”
Reopen Your Cold Case Files
Dreams give us clues that require sleuthing, but sometimes our best attempts to follow these leads don’t get far and we move on to other things, leaving a mounting pile of “cold case” files. I pick up a lot of unfamiliar names, foreign words, and curious phrases in dreams and — especially — in the twilight state of hypnagogia, and I have found it extraordinarily revealing to track these verbal clues. In the era of Googling, this is much easier than it was over most of the decades I’ve been keeping a journal, so I am now reopening dream files I had closed and making some exciting discoveries. One of those funny words, from a 1994 dream, led me to an archaeological site in Nigeria where the human remains date from 10,000 BCE. Another is guiding me, in the most practical way, on professional decisions I’ll be making over the next couple of months.
Be open to discovering that an event in an “old” dream is starting to manifest only now — months or years later — and be ready (beyond the “wow” response) to harvest guidance from the old report on the current situation. When you see a match-up between an “old” dream and a later event, forage around the individual report: look at other dreams from about the same time and see if there are further clues to the new situation.
Let Out the Artist inside You
I often type my journal reports directly into a computer to save the time required for transcription from a manuscript version and to get around the problem of finding it hard to decipher my own handwriting. When I write by hand, however, I find there’s an artist in me who wants to come bursting through. Suddenly the pages facing my text reports are filled with drawings that may then demand to be colored in or painted. Some of these drawings occupy successive panels like pages from a graphic novel. The famous movie director Federico Fellini, who started out as a cartoonist, kept dream journals that are primarily visual.
Many dream journalers find they have a poet inside. Or a songwriter. Sometimes a whole poem or song is delivered within a dream or in that fluid in-between zone of sleep-wake, dorveille. Some dream reports, with a little editing, effortlessly turn into poems. Every dream contains a story; some want to be stories in the fuller and finished sense, and journaling will get you there.
Journal from Journals
Thoreau
