Day One Uses: Dream Journal

Over the years we’ve seen people transform Day One into the most varied, incredible tools. From recording work progress to documenting the first months of a baby’s life, we are constantly amazed by the versatility of Day One. This series tries to help you find new things to journal about and enhance your life-recording experience with Day One. Today we continue with an unexpected use for Day One: Dream Journaling. Below are some tips, tricks, hows, and whys to get started with your Dream Journal today.

Remembering your dreams

It is not very often we remember our dreams, but when we do there is an incredible feeling of amazement. The same goes for the awful feeling of trying to remember a dream and failing. Starting a dream journal can transform something mundane like sleeping into a constant source of interest. Not only that, writing down your dreams will help you develop better skills in descriptive writing and help you make sense of your inner mind.

Sleep, dream, wake, write

Keeping a dream journal requires self-discipline, but once make a habit of it you will wonder how you lived without it for so long. Like any other habit—we’ve discussed this here before—you should strive to record your journal always at the same time and place. We suggest keeping your iPhone by your bedside and picking it up as soon as you wake up.

Protip: If you are using the iPhone or iPad app to record your dreams, open a new entry on the app before you lock your screen to sleep. This will allow you to unlock your phone and jump straight in to a new entry once you wake up. You can even pre-tag the entry with “#Dream” if you wish.

Dream vs. Interpretation

If you are lucky to remember your dreams, they are often a jumble of flashes and images. A good habit is to first write what you remember, even if it doesn’t make sense at first—it should be clear enough that you are able to understand what you wrote. Once you’ve done this brain dump, you should try to interpret it. Go back to previous dreams to see if they link in any form to the recent one, and also try coming back to last night’s dream during the day to interpret it with a fresh perspective.

Pro Tip: Make use of Day One’s markdown integration to clearly differentiate between the actual dream and the interpretation. Use hashtags with titles “#Dream” and “#Interpretation” to give each respective section a header.

Add a picture or sketch

Sometimes it is hard to put dreams into words, in that case pictures or sketches can help you understanding. If you dreamt about a room in your house, why not go ahead and take a picture of it to add to the entry? Good drawing skills? Fire up an app like Fifty Three’s Paper and draw what you remember—export it to camera roll and add it to your Day One entry.

Tag your entry with themes, or give your dream a name

Dreams usually have themes associated with them. Sometimes they are happy, or involve specific people and places. Make sure that once you are done jotting down what you can remember, you go back to read the dream looking for possible themes and tag them. Doing so will allow you to group your dreams and better understand them later with Day One tags. You will see how much your dreams relate not only to each other, but to your regular entries.

Pro Tip: If you like your dream journal separated from your normal journal, a good tag habit would be to use a specific sub tag for you dreams. Something along the lines of “#Dream:sad” or “#Dream: Park”. This will allow you to separate your normal tags from your dream tags.

About the Author

Tulio Jarocki is a student, design aficionado, and journaling enthusiast. When he is not writing about the rewards of journaling for Day One, he can be seen drinking coffee, running, or just out and about in Boston.