DREAM DICTIONARY

Keeping a Dream Journal

Get a notebook or diary for writing down your dreams. The notebook should be attractive to you and exclusively dedicated for the purpose of recording dreams. Place it by your bedside to remind yourself of your intention to write down dreams. Record your dreams immediately after you awaken from them.

You can either write out the entire dream upon awakening fromit or take down brief notes to expand later. Don't wait until you get up in the morning to make notes on your dreams.

If you do, even if the details of a dream seemed exceptionally clear when you awakened in the night, by morning you may find you remember nothing about it. We seem to have built-in dream erasers in our minds which make dream experiences more difficult to recall than waking ones. So, be sure to write down at least a few key words about the dream immediately upon awakening from it.

You don't have to be a talented writer. Your dream journal is a tool, and you are the only person who is going to read it. Describe the way images and characters look sound and smell, and don't forget to describe the way you felt in the dream-emotional reactions are important clues in the dream world.

Record anything unusual, the kind of things that would occur in waking life: flying pigs, or the ability to breathe under water, or enigmatic symbols. You also can sketch particular images in your journal. The drawing, like the writing, does not have to be fine art. It's just a way for you to make an intuitive and memorable connection with an image that might help you attain lucidity in future dreams. 

Put the date at the top of the page. Record your dream under the date, carrying over for as many pages as required. Leave a blank page following each dream description for exercises you will do later. If you rember only a fragment of a dream, record it, no matter how unimportant it might seem at the time.

And if you recall a whole dream, title your journal entry with a short, catchy title that captures the subject or mood of the dream. "The Guardian of the Spring" or "Riot in the Classroom" are examples of good descriptive titles. When you begin to accumulate some raw material in your dream journal, you can look back at your dreams and ask yourself questions about them.

The use of dream symbols for self-analysis is not the purpose of these pages, but many different techniques are available for working with dream journals.

There are many different methodologies for interpreting dreams. Lucid dreaming is a state of awareness, not a theory, and as such it can be applied eqqqually to many differnt kinds of dreamwork. No matter which kind of analysis you might perform on the contents of your dream journals, you will find that lucid dreaming skills can increase your understanding of the way in which your mind creates symbols.

This in turn can empower your effort towards integration of the different parts of your personality. Furthermore, reading over your journal will help you become familiar with what is dreamlike about your dreams so you can recognize them while they are still happening-and become lucid.

Reference: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming: Stephen laBerge, Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold.