Dream Journal Question:

What do you guys write in your DJ’s? I found that i used to only write actual full dreams that i remembered from start to finish, but i heard some people write just about everything and anything. Ranging from a feeling, or emotion, or sound, or basically anything they notice when they wake up they write down for the day.

So , what do you generally write?

Well most people write, like you said, full dreams from start to finish, they also tend to write both their normal and lucid dreams, others (like myself) only care to write out only our lucid dreams.

Just curious, will you be starting one yourself? :cool:

In my written DJ it’s different sometimes. When I’m in a hurry I only write some keywords down so I will remember it and I can write it in my typed DJ. My typed DJ contains almost every dream I have. Sometimes I don’t bother to post really small uninteristing fragments, but I still type them down and keep them in my own DJ. It’s almost completely in English while my written DJ is almost completely in Dutch.

Sometimes I don’t write something down in my written DJ and therefore I forget where it was about. I rarely do this with interesting dreams. If they are interesting and I don’t have any time to write them down I just think about them so I don’t forget them. Sometimes I even write down some dream key words on randomn papers on school.

If you want to improve your dream recall it’s important to write down everything you remember.

personally, I record everything. Full dreams, partial dreams, colors, textures, tastes, smells. Feelings and patterns. I find the more you record, the better your recall becomes. When I used to remember all of my dreams, I would, however, only record the interesting ones, and for the rest just write a summary.

Exactly. People need to understand that initially, dream journals are crucial. Since the LD community is a very liberal community, and since lucid dreaming is relatively new to the western world, there seems to be this “go about doing it anyway you want because everyone is different and special in their own unique way!” attitude. However, statistics and quotes from the formost researchers of lucid dreaming suggest otherwise.
Thinking you should just do it the way you want is a very dangerous mentality in my opinion, because it often times tends to support laziness and poor preformance. Look at it this way: unless you are some sort of prodigy, you can’t get truly good at a sport within a reasonable amount of time by thinking you are going to play by your own rules and practice at your own pace. To relate that more closely to lucid dreaming, it tends to cause a lot of mental blocks.
For example: I can’t summon a dream character by means of calling out his name, therefor that method doesn’t work for me.

What is wrong with the above statement? Its simply not true. If something doesn’t work in lucid dreaming, more often than not it is only a temporary problem being caused by a mental block.

Many people tend to forget that lucid dreaming is an exercise of the brain. For the vast majority of people, how well they do in LDing is slightly dependent on their natural ability and HEAVILY on how solid of a foundation they create for themselves. Laberge himself has even said many a time that learning to lucid dream effectively requires patience and practice. Something I’ve come to realize is a lot of people that “fail” at lucid dreaming simply arent even doing their best. At the very least you should set intent to recall every night and record everything you can about your dreams. Granted you may be too tired to get up during the night or too busy to write them down in the morning. Writing down keywords that spark the memory of the dream, is the solution to time constraints.

Moral of the story: Unless you started off with insanely good recall (4+ vivid dreams a night), I think you should absolutely treasure your dream journal.

The advice is generally given to beginners to write down in their DJ’s all they can remember (feeling, emotion, etc.) when they don’t remember dreams. If you have a good dream recall, you write dreams from start to finish, as you do.

wow thanks for all the replies! And to the first reply, yes i do intend on starting a DJ, and i think since my dream recall is average(generally i remember a dream or two a night, sometimes vivid, sometimes not) i think ill write down anything and everything:D

A dream or two a night is already a very good result.